The first year of my gaming journal has come to an end! I figured it would be appropriate to do a bit of a year in review to talk about the games I most enjoyed playing this year. I don't want this to be too long or anything, just a little bit of a reflection of my gaming goals this past year, what I achieved, and maybe a bit of what I plan for next year.

Let's pretend I actually finished drafting this post on the 31st and posted it then so that the tense in all of this makes sense.

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Cherrim's Game Log 2023

Hello and welcome to my new and improved gaming journal!

Last year (2022), I tried to do a physical journal and dropped it midway through the year because it was too much to keep up with, but I really loved the look and feel of my physical journal. I definitely won't have time to replicate all the designs and spreads I had in that journal digitally, I really wanted to retain that "notebook" feel going into 2023. So I did! My CSS this year replicates a journal with sticky notes and scrapbook photos. :) Sorry if the bright colours hurt your eyes but I'm team light mode 4ever. Also this thread is best viewed on desktop (or landscape mode if you have a smaller cell phone screen), but should still work okay on any device - the text just may not line up as nice!

I've challenged myself to beat 20 50 games this year in PC's Gaming Challenge, so I'll update this thread with each game I beat. If a game was part of the Game Along challenge, it will be marked by a star. If the game was 100% completed (did all content, got all trophies, etc.), it will have a double checkmark.


Here are some games I'm hoping to get to this year, both old and new. But given how unsuccessful I've been at committing to playing games when I write them down like this, I guess we'll see how that goes.

• Kingdom Hearts: Missing-Link
• Oxenfree 2
• Final Fantasy IX
• Hades
• Final Fantasy Type-0
• Mr. Saitou

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Log Update #17

First update of the year! New year, new me, new journal design. I've updated the first post of this thread with my 2023 info and shifted the 2021post down, so go check that out if you want, though it's really just my log of games beaten and challenge games.

I'm not gonna put a whole section for it, but I built a gaming PC the other week! It was (alas) not for me, but I've never actually built one before so it was a very interesting experience. I've replaced most parts of my PCs over the years, but actually assembling one from scratch is a whole other ball game. It actually worked the first time we turned it on! It gives me hope for when I build my own PC one day, hopefully in the next couple years. :D






I've tried to play this game many times and never got very far. In fairness, I think each time I tried to play it was when I was playing my PC from the couch with a controller or terrible mouse/keyboard setup and the options for that in the PC version are abysmal so I'd usually just give up. I almost did for good when I remembered the bad controller settings and realized I couldn't play from my Steam Deck but gave it one last chance on my laptop and I'm glad I did. Mostly.

I feel like I would have liked this game more if I'd actually played it the first time I bought it. Or the second time. I think it hasn't aged particularly well but I'm pretty sure I remember it being really impressive and innovative for its time. I feel like the core of it has just been outshone by later games piggybacking off its genre.

The parkour concept of Mirror's Edge is really good, but it felt a little inconsistent in its execution. The game highlights most things you can interact with in red, but not always and sometimes it's really unclear what the next step is. This wouldn't be too bad if every area had a whole bunch of ways to get through it, but unless I'm just really unobservant, a lot of sections ultimately only had one route through. I was constantly losing momentum because sometimes the game just wouldn't bother to highlight the next step and I'd have to stop and look around to figure out where it wanted me to go next. Since I've played a lot of games that definitely learned from Mirror's Edge and improved on the formula, it was just kind of frustrating to know there are games out there that have much more interesting pathfinding and do a better job of showing you your possibilities even if I was playing one of the OGs.

I also thought combat was really clunky. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out devs didn't want to include it at all but were forced to by the higher ups in order to green light the project. The few times when you have to stop and fight instead of outrunning the baddies were usually so contrived and the solution was basically always to just disarm and steal a gun from one of them in order to take out the others. It never really felt like I was taking the reins when enemies showed up. Either I was supposed to run past/through a given encounter or I had to stop and fight. It was always pretty clear cut which one the game expected of me and the times when I had to fight my way through never felt very good. They felt like they were there to make sure you actually used the combat/shooting system they'd coded in, lol.

All that aside, I did enjoy it! The game was very short and I finished it in about two sittings, but I definitely liked the length. It didn't overstay its welcome and the story was simple enough without adding too much padding to force the game to be longer and more studios need to be willing to do that, I think.

I've heard the sequel is garbage so I don't think I'll pick it up. :(


It's not an update to this thread without a long rambly section about XIV!

I may have labelled this for the patch that came out earlier this month, but I am probably not gonna talk a lot about that. The story hasn't been terribly interesting since Endwalker (not that I dislike it, I'm just not like on the edge of my seat waiting for it each time) so there's not a ton to say. I really love the new alliance raid and enjoy it a lot more than I did Aglaia after the first week. There's still lots of death in it so it's always a good time. I also had a new experience with the new ex trial! For the first time ever I jumped into a blind party in PF and we actually cleared it in about two lockouts! I've never actually done higher level content blind before, nor have I ever done an ex trial on content unless my static decided to do it week one... and even then, generally a handful of people have already cleared it and there are guides for me to watch before we head in. So that was a first and I'm proud of myself. :')

Speaking of, I'm still playing with my static. We're finally on P8S part 2 after a lot of setbacks these past few months. I switched to Summoner for this tier because MCH was in such a bad place for so long. I really miss it but our group doesn't have another mage so I'll stick with SMN for now, even tho MCH is doing better these days. (It got! Another mitigation tool! Emphasis on tool because you just yeet a wrench at the enemy.) It's nice having a raise (and Phoenix's heals) to help out with after a year of MCH not really having much of anything to bring to the table. My parses aren't as good as they were on MCH but they also aren't that much lower so the job change feels like a win? I do wish books weren't such boring weapons tho. My wol is supposed to be a jock, how dare the game make her read.

My last update is going to be that Lozz got the new Emet-Selch minion from maps and sold him to me at a discount and I am obsessed. My XIV wallet is hurting (I'd only just cracked 50M for the first time last week and now I'm down below 40M soB) but my god he's so ugly and hates me so much, look at him:


I love him dearly. ♥


I was soooo looking forward to this game. I do enjoy me a good Shakespeare play and I've always been quite fond of Zeboyd Games's brand of humour along with their interesting takes on turn based battle systems. Plus... magical girls? I was completely sold, of course. Who wouldn't be?

I played this on my Steam Deck and it was a great game for that, since it let me play it on the go and on the couch while watching TV for the grindy bits. It warned me the resolution might not be right when I started it, but I can't say I noticed anything off about it and it played like a dream.


The sprite work in this game was really good. They've always been great at mimicking ye olde 16-bit days, but especially coming to the game after playing the much more low-key Cthulu Saves Christmas just last month, I was blown away by the little graphical touches in this game. It was really cool having a full body view of the character I was selecting a move for, there were extra insert images for using/receiving attacks, AND TRANSFORMATION SEQUENCES!! I really wasn't expecting them even though every magical girl needs a good transformation sequence. (They are skippable, but when you go to skip them, the game does ask you if you also kick puppies. Shame on you.) The UI for the game, while not too far removed from previous Zeboyd games, just looked very updated and nice.


My one gripe with the game is partially my fault, but... I didn't really enjoy the battle system as much as I'd hoped. It's basically a slightly evolved version of the most recent one I played (Cthulu Saves Christmas) but with a lot more emphasis on status effects. I may be the kind of girl who typically doesn't bother with status effects because it's usually more effective to simply brute force my way to victory, but I actually like the implementation in Zeboyd titles! In Cthulu, I had a ton of fun my first playthrough bumping the difficulty up and giving myself a challenge, which meant really using everyone's kit to the fullest. But... I felt like that game did it way better because there were only 4 party members total, so you really got familiar with each of them in every battle. In TWML, there were like 7 characters and for the bulk of the game, you were given a set party of them. And for like 4 early stages in a row, most of those party members were really heavy on the status effect abilities. I ended up just setting the game to easy and breezing through because battles were so tedious when only one party member could reliably deal damage. The status effects didn't feel good to set up when you couldn't follow them up with a good heavy hitter. Maybe I was just bad at the game but I'd just played a game that had basically all the same sorts of abilities at my disposal and I was fine using them there. So the only thing I can point to with TWML is the number of party members and those members being poorly suited to support each other in terms of battle. I vaguely recall not really vibing with Cosmic Star Heroine's battle system too much either, but I didn't even remember that detail until I was looking for other reviews to validate how I felt about this game's system. I think it's basically the exact same as CSH's was, but I could be wrong.

Anyway, besides that the characters were cute and the plot was good enough. Another feature that was interesting was the "translation" feature, where anytime there was Shakespearean language, you could toggle between that original text and a translation for it in modern English. I admit I found myself wishing it wasn't played for jokes 90% of the time because I do like seeing how language evolves and being able to pick out exactly what part became what, but I also think that over-simplifying it with memes and sarcastic remarks is actually exactly what Shakespeare would have wanted in his magical girl adaptation so you know what? I'm fine with it. LOL.

Also, I really loved the last few lines in the game. I'd play the hell out of a sequel based on that one little hook. [ Spoiler: Anne and Diana WOULD be magical girls!! Absolutely!!! ]

I think I'll enjoy this game a lot if they ever patch it to add NG+ since I'll be able to use whatever party I want if other games are anything to go by. Maybe when that time comes, I'll even force myself to toss in some of the status effect-heavy characters instead of my endgame party of only heavy hitters. :')

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Log Update #18

I accidentally sort of beat a whole bunch of games this weekend so get ready for a really long entry...! Sorry if the Cardcaptor Sakura one breaks my CSS on mobile with it's really long name.






I need to just sit down and write this even though I know I'll end up leaving so much out. If I hadn't been on vacation when I completed most of this game, maybe I'd have updated more often and not be faced with having to talk about all 60-something hours I played.

But long story short, I really, really loved this game! It's definitely one of my fave Final Fantasies and I wish I'd played it much sooner, but better late than never! Although admittedly, I think the platform I played it on may have something to do with it because boy oh boy did I abuse the speed up feature. (And, I will admit upfront, I also turned on the 100% steal rate cheat lmao.) I think given how much I used the speed up, I probably wouldn't have enjoyed this unless maybe I emulated it instead to get the same feature. The autosave for retrying bosses faster was nice too. Basically lots of nice QOL additions went a really long way for me and if they ever remake the game, I hope they leave this option in.

This game is pretty old, but most of the time you can't really tell with the remaster version on Steam. Although I'm not sure how much of that was the remaster and how much was the Moguri mod. Anyway, it looked phenomenal and the... I believe AI-upscaled backgrounds? Were so pretty. Everywhere you go is so bursting with life and there's so much hidden stuff to examine and find that I always found myself taking my time on every map to find everything and talk to everyone. The character models were definitely updated and they looked so detailed. I know back in the day this game got a lot of flak for being too cutesy and childish after the more edgy FF7 and especially FF8 where the characters were more realistically proportioned (at least in battle, in FF7's case) and the story just felt more mature whereas this went back to full fantasy. But I thought it was really charming and its themes were really well presented. I liked the way it often swapped up your party to give you a reason to use everyone. You could see where the remaster was kicking in pretty often tho. The game is originally 4:3 and that's what all the cutscenes, especially FMVs, were made in mind with. The FMVs just give you black bars during them, but everywhere else that they extended the screen, sometimes it would be obvious. Some battle effects were only made for 4:3 so they awkwardly cut off but my fave was when in cutscenes characters would just walk to the side of the screen and in the original game they were obviously fully out of frame and out of the scene entirely but in this they'd just stack on that outer point, still in plain view hahaha. And sometimes when it would transition smoothly from FMV to gameplay (which I imagine was very impressive for its time! I remember a lot of FF8 I was struck by how much the cutscenes had evolved since FF7 and I saw that to a lesser extent here), the character would have to walk into the frame from the black bars to get to position, haha.


One complaint I might have about it is there weren't very many parts of the soundtrack that I found super memorable. It was nice to know where "You're Not Alone" came from and I love the song even more now that I've seen its context, but for the most part I just didn't really find a lot where I was like "oh man I HAVE to go listen to the soundtrack later and hear this song over and over again" which is actually a pretty common occurrence for Final Fantasy games. The music wasn't bad—it never took me out of the moment or anything and it was always fitting for the locales, but I do think maybe in terms of themes and songs it might be one of the weaker FFs for me. (Although that said, this did make me pull up the soundtrack to listen to as I type this and the songs are all solid BGM.)


I didn't finish everything in this game. I did probably 75% of the sidequests and most of the chocobo treasure hunting, but after around what I think was mid-disc 3, I kind of just wanted to go ahead and finish it. I could already tell then that it was going to end up as one of my faves so I know I'll be back to replay one day and maybe then I'll go for 100%.


It was kind of difficult to pick a game for the gaming challenge this month. The problem with the nostalgia theme is I give into nostalgia all the time. If I remember a game I used to like and feel like playing it again, I almost always make time to play it... sometimes even once a year or more. So in trying to keep with the spirit of the prompt and the sense of returning to something that held a lot of nostalgia as a kid and re-examining it under a fresh light, it was tricky because I've updated my views on so many of my "nostalgia" games repeatedly over the years. I almost went with FFX since I was due for a revisit and had originally played that at around age 14 or 15, but I also didn't really want to play a really long JRPG right after finishing one, even if it would be interesting to see the progression between them so close together. Anyway, I digress. I picked Pokémon TCG because I remembered just how excited I was for it to come out when I was a kid. I think it was the first time I was ever actually aware of the concept of a release date and man I watched that calendar religiously. And I think I've only replayed it maybe once in all that time? A good pick for the prompt!

And wow I hated it so much in the first few hours. What did I say on twitter as I contemplated giving up... "I don't have the infinite patience for games that I did back when I was 11 and got one or two new games a year." I'm sure as a kid I was just so excited to see the TCG cards rendered in a video game and to be able to play with whoever I wanted with whatever cards I wanted that the slog of it all didn't bug me. I'm surprised I was able to beat the game as a kid, though. Those first few hours after you get your first deck and have to try to build up your cards by beating other trainers were real rough. It was a little better once I had enough cards to make my deck a dual-type deck instead of a triple-type deck, but even then I struggled a lot.

I stuck with it though and eventually, at some point, I was able to brute force my way through enough duels that I could create some decks from scratch. It was pretty annoying the way cards were locked into your deck any time you made one, so like if I wanted to make a deck with Bill in it, kind of a necessity, either I needed to spread my cards across multiple decks or go in and edit them every time to remove those cards from my old deck (and replace them with filler) and then put them into my intended deck. It felt like a system that was really showing its age.

I think when I was a kid I was happy to just fight the same NPCs over and over. If I found someone I could beat, it was totally cool to just keep beating them and eventually my cards probably built up enough to do cool things with them. I also wasn't so concerned with beating games as a kid. (In retrospect, I think I didn't beat this game when I was younger... I bet when I got the itch to replay it in my teens, I picked up my old game and just finished it instead of starting over.) So it probably didn't bug me so much if I couldn't do things. I feel like I remember half the fun of the game was looking for Imakuni? because he was so weird and the idea that he'd show up in random places thrilled me back then lol.

Anyway, the game was fine by the end. I largely ran a super barebones haymaker deck because I couldn't bring myself to grind for a proper one and I'd tailor my deck per opponent. I'm pretty sure I beat every NPC in the game once (including asserting my spelled-with-a-C superiority over Erik, see below) but I already got all the cards on my original file back in the day, so I had no desire to put that effort in again. Credits were enough!


Oh my final observation is it was hilarious to see just how 90s all the NPCs' names were. I feel like the main series wasn't nearly so... like that. Even in the RBY days. But they were just soooo 90s North America. I swear every single NPC was a classmate I had in elementary school and for whatever reason I just found it hilarious.


I had an Amazon Prime trial this month because I needed urgent shipping on something a bit ago and with it expiring in a few days, I suddenly remembered to go claim my free games and stuff on the Twitch side of things. I downloaded a few games I had in that library to check out and here they all are. (Apparently I don't lose access to them when prime expires but I was not sure and did not think to look it up until quite late in the weekend when I'd already dedicated most of it to trying to play as many as I could before they might disappear Playstation Plus-style.)

This was a cute little point and click game where you learn about a family through some of its generations (hence the KIN capitalized in its title). Apparently this is the first chapter of several, but it's the only chapter I had access to. As I was playing, it reminded me of a cross between A Little to the Left and Unpacking, and lo and behold, when I was looking up the sequel chapters on Steam, those two games were the only ones in the "similar to games you've played" category ahaha. You basically click around and solve little puzzles in each room that unlock little bits of information about each member of the family, and then you're supposed to piece together who's who and where they fit in the tree.

Most of it was fine, but the part where I think it really shined was kind of at the end. I don't want to spoil too much, but this family member was a millennial or zoomer who very carefully curated his online space, so instead of using a scrapbook or portrait sort of motif to get his deal across, it actually gives you access to his desktop and then as you click around into different apps, like email, the music player, the photo gallery, the browser, etc. you start to get a sense of who he is. He runs a travel blog, uploads a lot to his travel influencer instagram-knockoff, and also composes music. But as you click around and do stuff like upload songs to the soundcloud-knockoff, some of the things that happen paint a different picture. It was just a very well done piece of environmental storytelling in a way that clicked with me a lot more than the other family members. [ Spoiler: It was sooo uncomfortable getting emails from people lowkey (or outright!) accusing you/the character of faking your travel posts. And then when you could go through and reply to everything on his instagram feed and so many of the options had little negs in them, it painted suuuuch a good picture of who this guy really was. Really well done!! ]

The game was pretty short and I'd like to play further chapters, but it's definitely a "wait for a sale" sort of game for me.


This was another one of my amazon games. I went into it entirely blind and downloaded it based on a pretty cover image and seeing "typing game" in the blurb. I recently put together a mechanical keyboard and I'm still sort of getting used to it, so this seemed like a great fit.

And it was a fun game! It reminded me of some of the flash games that used to be on Neopets where you'd type in your answers to take down waves of enemies and stuff. The game mechanic is casting spells by typing to attack enemies or interact with the environment. You can also type in spell modifiers like "large" (makes your spell radius bigger) or "ray" (concentrates your spell into a line going from you to the target) and you can do some pretty neat things with them. The target names are randomized (so that if there are, say, multiples of the same enemies, you can target a specific one), but they're always words that have to do with the target. For example, targetting a healing plant to heal some HP might have you typing "heal", "aid", "cure". And the enemies were always some sort of nasty, negative word. The poison bomb enemies might be things like "cyanide", "venom", "virulent". It was a simple thing and at times was like reading a thesaurus, but I thought it was a cute touch.


They really committed to the bit because you do everything by typing. (To the point where your movement keys are actually esdf instead of wasd... so that your hands stay on home row... I thought that was so clever hahaha.) When you talk to NPCs, you initiate conversation by typing in the prompt above their head like "hi". To branch into different topics, you type the topic when it's highlighted. It's pretty simple stuff but I thought it was interesting.

There was a lot of worldbuilding in this. The devs clearly put a lot of time and effort into building out this world and the locations in it. The sort of gimmick of your character is they're an "archivist", so there's a lot of emphasis on examining fauna and flora out in the world and the more you do it, the more notes you take on them. But I did sort of find that while I know things like what plants or mushrooms different clans use to add a spicy kick to their cooking, I often found myself a bit confused about the plot because important things would get skimmed over or just mentioned in passing. It was a bit strange.

The final boss was also kind of a disappointment. It was basically just a "survive waves of enemies" over and over whereas other bosses in the game had some puzzle elements to them. So that was weird, too. You'd think the final boss would have had me using all my spells, extra modifiers, and so on... but there was nothing of the sort and then the game ended quite abruptly. :S Still, I had fun and I maxed out my character and all the journal lore, so I feel safe calling this 100% complete!


Here is my keyboard by the way. It's so pink! And very quiet for a mechanical keyboard! I love it!



Following the TCG game, I kinda wanted to play some other games I'd remembered from my childhood. One that I was actually really excited to check out was a Cardcaptor Sakura game I'd downloaded a GBC rom for when I was like... 12? Of course I couldn't read ANY Japanese and obviously couldn't figure out how to do anything so I gave up on it quick, but I always thought about it over the years. Now that I can read Japanese, I figured I'd give it a try. You will notice that the game in this entry is a GBA game and that is because 20 years later, fluent in reading Japanese, I still couldn't figure out how to play that GBC game LOL. Upon looking up some info about it, I do understand now but it's kind of like... a realtime-based thing where you catch certain cards on certain days at certain times and with my regrettably nocturnal lifestyle these days, the game just isn't gonna be a match for me. So I picked out a different CCS game to scratch the itch instead and ended up with this one.

It's basically a glorified mini-game collection, but it did have a story mode to unlock the mini-games, so I was able to beat it. :P The story just follows the third season of the original anime as Sakura has to turn all her cards into Sakura Cards. Each chapter of the story is a different episode with really blurry GBA-era screenshots from the anime and a little narration/dialogue to go with it. Then you play a minigame based on the episodes.


There's a decent variation here. Some mazes, a rhythm game, lots of beat-the-enemies. The final battle was othello, which I am very bad at, so that probably gave me the most trouble of anything haha. It was very much made for kids so the games are quite easy, but it was a fun game and the pixel art in it was very cute.

I realized after I beat it that it also had an oekaki mode with... kind of a robust painting app????? Any time a game gives me a canvas for any reason, I draw a Cherrim. I have many a Professor Layton game where the little notepad it gives you just has an ugly Cherrim on it and no notes to speak of. And that's what I was expecting with this. I thought I'd just have 9 ugly default colours, maybe a few brush tip sizes, and maybe an erase tool if I was lucky. I didn't expect an expanded pallet that I could customize the colours for with rgb sliders, a line/circle/rectangle tool, fill, and even a magnifier that lets you very precisely place your pixels at 2x or 4x??? My ugly Cherrim took me over an hour because I was playing around with it so much hahaha.



I played this over a few nights as my wind-down game in bed and happened to beat it midway through my weekend madness so it ended up in the update.


The last of my amazon games (for now?), I finished this in a night. I'd heard of it before but had never really looked into it much. It's basically a stealth game where you take on the role of a guy who's always called to clean up crime scenes. He disposes of the bodies, scoops up any evidence in sight, and wipes up the blood stains. You have to do all this by avoiding the cops on the scene and it's pretty fun. The story that unravels are you go through the missions is interesting too. It sounds gruesome (which I think is why I never looked into it too much before), but the simplistic art style goes a long way and I really had fun with it.

I liked the gameplay loop a lot. You have to wander around avoiding cops and guards and you can distract them with noises, move large items to block their paths, and so on. If they see you, they'll catch you and you have to start the level over, but there's also places to hide to reset their aggro, so to speak. Any time you get caught, the location of the evidence and bodies resets, so it's never a matter of getting really good at figuring out one route through the level, you really have to learn the level's offerings inside out to get to a body in any place and get it to a disposal place. Even if I had to do some complicated levels over and over and over again to get them right, I never felt frustrated for long because it always felt very doable.



The sequel looks like it adds in a lot more mechanics when I really would just want more of the same thing, so I'll probably pass on that.

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Log Update #19

Whyyyy did I play so many games without updating? Now it's going to take me forever to write this. I think I'm gonna forego any screenshots because I didn't really take any memorable ones for any of these games. (I really should have for Outer Wilds, but I finished the game and realized I was literally so enthralled the whole time that I forgot to step out of the moment ever for a screenshot.)


I think a bit of my theme for February with a lot of the games I played was nostalgia, but I let myself pick up some titles that were more recent than my teen years. One of them was Papers Please. I have no idea why it called out to me one day, but suddenly I really wanted to play it again. This happens on occasion where I'll load it up and play a few days and get bored, but this time it hooked me again and I played through the whole thing. And then I went "well that was fun, maybe I could get all the endings?" And I proceeded to get all 20 endings. Along with all the achievements.

The game is still a really solid game. There's some stuff that always makes me go :( like having to let ppl through when they don't match the gender of their name or official ID or w/e, but the fact that it takes place in the cold war era does at least... give it an excuse lol. (Not that it would have been that out of place a decade ago when it first released either, I suppose.) The gameplay progression is very good and the way it lets you branch off your timeline to repeat days and get other endings works very well. Trying to remember every little task while also remembering all this data about the various countries to verify everything is so good. It's definitely one of those timeless games that I think everyone should try out.


This was one of those "free to play" games on Switch for a week and even though I only noticed maybe a day or two before the campaign ended, I picked it up and managed to beat it in that time, lol. I love this series a lot and played sooo much of it when I was younger. Really, if I'd been thinking, this would have been way better for nostalgia than the Pokémon TCG title since it was one of the defining games of my friends and I in high school. We'd load it up at parties and pass the controller back and forth doing levels lol.

Anyway, I'm glad this version was free while I played because it's just a port of the first game. It's a great game, but I've played these levels so many times over the years. Fun to go back to, but I'd really love for them to release something new instead of rereleasing these levels over and over again.


I was still on a nostalgia kick so I pulled up this game. What I was really nostalgic for was the original flash game(s) this was based off of (1 and 2 in the series) and this game is not that. I think in development they wanted to make it a game worth paying for instead of the same game you could play for free in your browser, so they added all these extra levelling systems and stuff, but I kind of found it didn't add anything to my enjoyment. It was harder to afford the things I wanted, the evolution system was annoying to deal with, and the idea that the world would start to fight back by researching a cure was a cool idea, but in practice instead of going through and terrorizing whatever cities you wanted, you'd do that until the world was setting up a cure facility and then you'd make a beeline for that facility and attack that city until it was gone and then repeat. It's... fine, I guess, but the whole time I was just yearning for the more simplistic browser versions.

I tried to go play those ones but with flash being dead, I think they're just lost forever and this version of the series is all I have left. :(


I was thinking about nostalgia games (the theme continues!!) and even booted up the programming games by this developer once or twice, but was still stuck on the same challenges I'd never completed, so I gave up pretty quickly... but then I realized I had a title by them that I hadn't actually played before. Or I don't think I've played... I know I've watched someone play this and I thought it was my brother but he didn't recognize it at all, so maybe I have played it? At any rate, I didn't remember it very well, so I played through the whole thing.

At first it seems like kind of a boring game where you "order" items by mail and then you burn them up in your fireplace. Sometimes they do cool things when they burn up. But the core of the game is mainly puzzle-based, where there's a list of combos you have to burn up together and the only hint you have is the name of the combo. Like one of them was the "Movie Night Combo" where you burn up a cob of corn (which pops into popcorn) and a television (which you watch movies on) at the same time. There's like a hundred of these and some are more obvious than others.

The only frustration point of the game for me is how any time you mail ordered an item, it would have a cooldown. I'm guessing this was to prevent you from systematically trying everything instead of thinking your way through your combos, but it was really frustrating to have to wait upwards of 2 minutes for some items. There were ways to speed it up that were pretty easy to come by, but if it wasn't hard to get the items that speed it up anyway, why even have the long wait? We were already limited by the amount of item slots we had room for at one time which I think was perfectly fine. By the end when everything has kind of a long cooldown, sometimes I'd just order a bunch of things that I was pretty sure had to do with combos and just browse twitter for a few minutes. I'm never a huge fan of games where the whole point is not to play. My other complaint was that there were dozens of items, but some of the combos used the same item like 5-6 times and some of the items in the game were never used in a combo. Given that some of the combos could be for up to 4 items, I feel like they probably could have had everything used once, or at least not bloated out the item list so much if so much of it was just filler.

Anyway, I don't think I realized before this that all their games take place in the same world, although to be fair I think this one somehow had the most interesting or "expansive" plot of any of them. Kinda wanna go back to World of Goo and see if that matches up too.


Gonna be honest: this might be the best video game I've ever played.

And the big meme about Outer Wilds is that no matter how much you love it, you can't really talk about any of it without spoiling the experience for others, so you sound like a crazy person as you try to evangelize people into playing it.

Basically you play as an alien on their first day of space flight. They're approved to go up into space to explore and once you get through the little tutorial village and get your launch codes, you're clear for take off. So you do that and then you can explore the whole solar system. And then 22 minutes later (or sooner if you fall off a cliff like I did), the sun explodes and you die. And then you wake up at the start like nothing happened and can do it all again - or explore somewhere else, if you want. And that's the hook.

I say it's the best game I've ever played because even though it doesn't really direct you at ALL, the progression in this game is so satisfying. Learning more about the solar system, finding out what happened to the previous race that lived there, translating excerpts from their civilization, and learning how to explore further and unlock other mysteries is just so, so good. You'll find out a little tidbit about one planet while exploring what you thought was a completely unrelated area. You'll think you have something all figured out and then get to a new area that opens up a whole new idea to your understanding of the world. And the solar system is just so creative. The planets are all so unique and creative and even without the underlying mysteries of the world, they're just a joy to explore and poke around in. Some loops I wouldn't even really do anything, I'd just pick a place and hang out until the world ended. Once I got flung out into space and instead of just resetting my loop because I couldn't do anything, I just... watched until my air ran out, taking everything in.

And I already feel like I've said too much. I think everyone should try this so long as they don't get motion sickness from first person games or some other accessibility issue. And definitely, definitely do not touch the spoiler tag below if you have not played it, even if you aren't totally sure you ever will.



If there was ever a game I wish I could completely forget so I could re-experience it for the first time, it's this one, hands down. I still have the DLC to pick up at some point, which I have heard good things about and will scratch that itch down the line, but I don't know what I'll do when I no longer have that to look forward to. I guess evangelize it harder and beg people to let me watch them play.


In less "changed my outlook on what games can accomplish" news, I am trying to play through Final Fantasy XV content for the game theme for March, which is fishing. I'm hoping to get through FFXV the base game, so while I was waiting for stuff to install, I took an evening to play this. It's a side-scroller beat-em-up which I am notoriously bad at (possibly the only genre I'm worse at than platformers) and I almost had to give up and bump the game down to easy, but I managed to persevere through the whole thing.

It's told through the lens of King Regis reading Noct a bedtime story when he was just a little kid and that was such a cute angle to use. Any time you die, Noct interjects like "you didn't REALLY die though, did you?" and Regis will quip something like "I was just checking to see if you were paying attention... ;) Here's how it really happened." and then it sets you back at the last save point. It was really sweet. The gameplay itself wasn't really anything to write home about, but I was definitely also just too bad at it to appreciate it fully haha. Still, it was a fun little game for what was really just a few hours of effort.


Aaaand this was my game for March. Not content with just the fishing minigame in Final Fantasy XV........... I played the fishing game. This is a Playstation VR title and the whole thing is just... you are a hunter in the world of Final Fantasy XV and you go fishing. And hunt down daemon fish. And also catch lots of normal fish. And meet the characters from FFXV along the way.

This was a lot more fun than I thought it would be. My PS4 isn't a Pro or even a slim, so it was definitely chugging along trying to render this game at the horrendous resolution it gave me (I think it was probably like 480p or something), but VR is still interesting enough that I didn't mind too much. I do wish they'd gone with a more stylized look for the game instead of imitating FFXV's graphics because for fish that were farther away, sometimes it was hard to make out anything on the screen because there just weren't enough pixels for it. And sometimes it was hard to get a good look at stuff even closer up because the resolution was so wonky and things would kind of shift in your view awkwardly.But otherwise the locations they picked were very pretty, the fish were pretty cool when you picked them up and turned them around in your hand, and the night levels were super interesting to look through when all the monsters/fiends were out to play.

The weirdest part about this game was that it has a pretty robust character creation part to it. I could customize specific facial features with sliders, I could even make a fat character (something a lot of games won't let you do!), and I could customize every piece of colour on my clothes, down to the stitching on a pair of jeans as well as the colour of the faded wash on them. But... it's a VR game. You spend most of the game in first person as the character. Sure I can look down and see the pink shoes I gave her, but why were the facial customization options so robust??? There's a photo mode that will take an ugly photo of your character (holding up a fish, if you so desire), so I guess the customization was for that, but the photos are totally optional and I just feel like this level of customization could have gone to our car, which we see quite a lot, or like... the cabin we go to between every mission, or anything else really.

The most annoying part of this game (besides the final stage of the final boss, which was basically just button mashing with your crossbow - did I mention you get a crossbow for the boss fights?) was probably how your car "breaks down" every 3-4 missions. But the game doesn't tell you this, the only way you know something is wrong with your car is because Cindy shows up at your cabin to fix it. And she just stands there doing nothing (but being weird and asking you to step back if you try to walk up to her to talk to her) until you decide to use your car to go somewhere. And then the game blackscreens and you're sitting in the driver's seat and Cindy is leaning over and sticking her ass out so it's all you can see and then she stands up and goes "oh, you wanna go somewhere? Good timing, I just finished up and you're good to go!" or whatever as she stands up, and then she comes up to the driver's window and leans over so you can see her cleavage really well and reminds you to give her a holler if you ever need anything else, and then she disappears and you're back to the usual level select. The ONLY reason for this mechanic is to repeatedly give you an excuse to oggle her butt and boobs and, like, okay I will admit I appreciated it the first time or so but eventually you've got fish to catch and I don't need the added minute or so before every few missions!! The game already loads so slowly for me, don't make everything take even longer! There should have just been a phone on the wall to call for a repair or have that happen once every 15 missions or something as a lil treat if they really had to include it. Or have some other characters show up sometimes for a change instead so it's not so painfully obvious that the scene is there for regular fanservice.

Anyway, I actually liked this enough that I wanna give completion a shot, but my cat chews wires and when I have the VR headset on, I can't see or hear him coming and I worry he'll destroy my expensive equipment so alas I can't play this very often because I have to shut him away in my room for hours at a time when I do. So hopefully I'll get to the rest of this, but possibly I won't. u_u

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Log Update #20

Yet again I played a bunch of games and didn't take the time to write a journal. I've got some games on the go that I'm not dedicating space to talk about here but Plants VS Zombies was gonna be my cop out game if I couldn't come up with something for the undead theme or w/e last month. Sun Haven I picked up because Lozz told me to and then I realized immediately it was too addictive and have stopped so I could be more productive elsewhere in my life before I fall into it. And Strange Horticulture I've started for this month's challenge.


It's been a good long time since I played this and I was itching to go through it again. I'd intended to back when I was finally eligible for the "play again after 5 years" achievement a while back, but for whatever reason it didn't grip me. But a bit ago my mom and I watched Severance which cites Stanley Parable as one of its inspirations and that really kicked that urge into overdrive.

I still really love this, but I am a bit sad I was too cheap to pick up the remaster. The price tag just seemed a bit much for what sounds like just a few new endings. u_u


This was one of my most anticipated games of this year. I love Rakuen and this is set in the same… universe, I guess? About a week before it came out, though, the developer shared that expectations should probably be tempered as it is not as full an experience as Rakuen. I'm glad she did because I definitely would have been disappointed by the 4~5 hour playtime if I hadn't known ahead of time that that's all it would be. I wish I'd known further ahead of time than like the week of, though.

The music and visuals were fantastic, as I knew they would be. The content was… fine? The story wasn't as good or fleshed out as Rakuen. I thought it was funny and cute, but there just wasn't as much substance and writing about it a month later, I can't really remember a lot about it whereas I fondly remember the characters and main plot beats of Rakuen. I even played through the whole thing twice the day it came out because I was trying to get the final achievement and never could figure out what I was missing to get it.


Anyway, it was a nice little foray back into the world of Rakuen but I really wanted it to be something more. :(


I played this on a whim. I know I'd played a bit of this years ago and just never really got into it, but I decided to give it another shot. Aaaand it was extremely confusing because it has no title screen so I never realized that it was actually continuing the file I started years ago that I had no memory of. My main complaint of the game right up to the end was that the game just tosses you in with absolutely no tutorial whatsoever. Like, obviously a traditional "here's how to play" mode outside the game would kill the vibe, but the only thing close to a tutorial I could find were a few puzzles that looked finished in the middle of nowhere. Sure, that should have clued me in, but the game itself has so little direction or explanation that I didn't really think anything of it. I rationalized seeing some completed puzzles as part of the sparse worldbuilding, I rationalized one of the light beacons already pointing up the mountain as being a silent explanation of what to do… and so on.

I actually wonder if maybe my brother or a roommate played the game for like half an hour and then the first time I played I accidentally continued their abandoned save file and similarly assumed the game had no direction at all… I recall managing to do one or two puzzle sets the first time and then getting stuck elsewhere. This time I pushed through or looked up how to do certain puzzle types (that I had evidently done the actual tutorial sections for years in the past) so that I could proceed, all the while cursing how bad the game design was for not teaching me how to do those things naturally during the game.

When I beat the game, it automatically started me in on a new file and it was kind of funny how long it took me to realize what must have happened. I was going through what was the actual tutorial area like "where were these when I was starting out???" lmao. I felt pretty silly when I realized what must have happened but also… I'm still going to say that it's bad game design to boot immediately into the game and have a vague enough menu that someone could manage to not realize they're not playing a new save file.

Oh but also the endgame absolutely sucked (basing the height of your challenges on visual effects that literally give your players headaches is bad game design), as did the puzzle with the bird audio cues. And apparently there's like audio files that give the game some semblance of a story but I only ever found one and it was about… yeast? I think? So it really didn't help give me any sense of what was going on and I was so confused by starting a ways into the game that I lost a lot of my curiosity anyway.

All in all I would say the ideal way to play this game is definitely not whatever I did. However the feeling of "hot damn, I'm a genius" whenever you figure something out that you've been stuck on is hard to beat and that's kind of why I kept going.


I'd heard good things about this game but then two separate people that I rarely talk to DMing me to tell me I should play it the week before April's theme turned out to be afterlife-y kinda seemed liked it was meant to be. (Woulda been even more perfect if its sale hadn't ended a few days prior to the messages of recommendation, wah. And another sale starting like a week after I finished it RIP.)

The game hooked me really quickly. The art is sooo nice and the characters have so much expression to their poses. It's a visual novel, but it plays around with camera angles to make the conversations feel a lot more dynamic than your typical VN. There's a bit of exploration too but you're rooted to the spot as you do it. I think it's a testament to the art/game design how this could manage to be so unsettling.

I think my favourite part of this game was the characters. They're all so good and oh my god SO many good female characters. I loved every one of them and there were more girls than guys which like? Never happens?? Everyone was so interesting and they all meshed together really well. I was always interested in picking up a plotline to see what was going to happen next with the characters and seeing the protagonists' stories cross over during the course of the game was always quite satisfying.

I had to go really slow at first because the prologue is actually kinda scary. ;_; It has jump scares and a really spooky atmosphere that wasn't overly present in the rest of the game. I couldn't really play during the day because the vibe wasn't right but if I played it too close to bedtime I'd be too freaked out to sleep quickly lmfao. It was a bit unfortunate that they didn't keep up that same feel for the whole game though. After you survive the first night, the stakes don't seem nearly as high because the rest of the game largely takes place during the day when the deadly curses have no power. Still good, but I think the game would have been better if there had been a second night to survive or more reason to feel the higher stakes during the day.

Really, the only issues I had with the game in the end was that it was maybe a bit too short. The game wasn't a full $90 game so it's not like I was expecting it to be 60+ hours, but I would have happily played it that long and I think it would have given it room to keep those higher stakes running longer. I think it also would have given it more room to do something more with the branching timelines instead of really only using them for one-off deaths or bad ends. I love love love story tropes that use branching timelines to spell out more of the story or given hints that you could never get elsewhere and while this game uses that to an extent (which I think is why you see so many comparisons to Zero Escape), I don't think it really uses it to the full extent that it should.
I think a larger game scope would also have given it a chance to set up the ending better than just [ Spoiler: "the true ending happens in a timeline where none of the game takes place". I liked the overall twists and turns that the game took, but I'm never a fan of endings where all the progress that the character make gets erased because the timeline is overwritten and stuff like that. And the ultimate ending didn't feel earned as a result. It was nice that the epilogue/credits seemed to show the characters coming to much the same conclusions as in the story itself, but it's not the same! ]

Overall a fantastic game, though. It sounds like they want to make this a series and I really hope they do because I would absolutely love to play more.


Not sure why but I felt like replaying this and I'm glad I did, it's fun! I'm very bad at it though! I played it on easy and got the ok ending and then started another playthrough where I was gonna rescue Curly Brace and get the good ending but today I realized that rescuing her gives you a new version of the final dungeon that's all about platforming and I suck so much at platforming that I am legit just dropping the game and calling it quits. :(


I liked the mechanics in this game, even if it felt kinda slow at times. I tried to play this on my Steam Deck as it's verified for it, but the screen was so small I thought it was a waste because I wouldn't be able to see much—plus the controls are tapping and dragging, which isn't great on the Deck even if it has a touch screen. So instead I played it on my iPad since I still have my game subscription there and it's part of that and it was definitely the right decision so I could really appreciate the visuals.

Buut the game is really simple and I did find myself wishing there was more to it throughout most of it. The game is only an hour or so long and I feel bad because this is definitely a case of me judging a game by what it's not rather than what it is, but I do wish there had been things to explore in each screen. There's some things you can click on like a pop up book to see a little animation or something, but they don't do anything. There's nothing to collect and it's not obvious when something is just for show or when it might do something or even when it's what you're supposed to interact with. So the game is basically just a walk from start to finish only pausing for some flashback scenes.

Anyway, for what it was, it was fine.


I never give XIV updates anymore but I guess I've done some stuff recently! About a month ago I got really into crafting/gathering and finally got all my DoL/DoH jobs up to 90, finally got the full mentor crown by doing gathering collectibles (booo I liked not having the "easy" part of the crown lol), and then managed to make my own BiS gear for the jobs! I haven't fully melded either set yet because I got a bit bored of all of it, but I will eventually, I assume. It'd be nice to be able to make my own crafted gear for next raid tier.

Speaking of raid tiers, it took us a very long time but my static finally cleared p8s! One of the mechanics is alchemy, so we went with Full Metal Alchemist glams. I was.... Lust? I gotta admit I think I was the only one who hasn't actually seen it (beyond like 10 episodes of the old anime, maybe). But all the same, I was happy to clear! I really liked part 2 but part 1 was too long and it really stressed people out. We almost considered not even getting our full 8 books because reclears were rough for so long.

The next tier drops in the next patch, so in the meantime we've decided to go back and finish up e12s. We'd been progging it waaaay back when Endwalker dropped and I think with a few more nights we probably could have stumbled past lions to see the door boss cutscene, but alas we didn't have time. So we've come back to it and we're progging it synced with no echo. We'll probably get to the second part on Monday and we're considering dropping our no echo rule just so we can clear the fight before 6.4 lol.

One of our tanks decided that for next tier he'd like to play DPS if anyone was up for switching soooo... I'm actually back on my original main, DRK! We decided to do the swap for this fight to ease into our new roles and it's pretty satisfying to be back on my old Shadowbringers main as we go through the final raid boss for the expansion. I'm a bit horrified by how many buttons DRK has (and this is at 80... I have more buttons to look forward to once we're back on 90 content) and I have a lot more practice to do to get back into the swing of the rotation because I kind of didn't play it for like a year lol. Still, I'm very excited!

Back when I first started with this group, I would have preferred to have played tank, but it seemed all the tank spots were filled by the time I hopped on (I was late to our first raid night lmaoo) so I ended up as MCH. Actually... this will mean that I've swapped jobs for every tier of Pandaemonium, lol. I was still MCH for the first tier, but then because MCH was in a bad place at the start of Endwalker and we'd taken on an 8th member who was a BRD, I switched to SMN for this most recent tier because it would get us the buff for having each job type in the party and also some utility since we lost all our red mages. And now I'm swapping to DRK. I fear it's making me a worse parser since I inevitably have a bit of "oh god I have to learn a new job in high end content" but I guess eventually got my SMN parses up to blue for most fights last tier. Hopefully I won't be embarrassing as a tank next tier!!!

Oh also I started a new character to try to get used to playing on controller on my Steam Deck and made it through ARR. The new Lahabrea fight is okay but omg I really love the new Cape Westwind. It's so good! I was sad they took it out because I always loved scaring sprouts in it by putting macros and markers out for what was (usually - unless somehow you wipe) a faceroll fight, but they had no way to know that because it was their first 8man. Anyway, this is a worthy successor and I'm glad I finally got to play it. I still suck ass on controller, but now it's less because of targetting and more because it feels so restrictive in terms of movement. :( I should keep at it.


(I was only gonna do a short update about this at the top but it crept long enough that I figured I should give it its own section lol.)

I played some Pokémon Diamond on my first Cherrim's anniversary since my intention was to finally bring it up to the most recent generations but then I was like "what if I got all the ribbons first". So I started a grind and got a couple more easy contest ribbons before realizing that I messed up my poffins 15 years ago and there's no way I'll have the stats to get any of the master ribbons. :(( So I turned to battle tower and wow I'm really bad at it! But the one Pokémon I ever EV trained is still in my party (apparently I sent all my other Pokémon to gen 5 ages ago, which I do NOT remember doing) and I was making decent progress with it, so I was like "hey why don't I get another Pokémon and EV train it to help". So I went to catch a Gible so I could get a Garchomp and the first one I found was? Shiny??? I almost ran from it because I wanted a boy and was also on autopilot running from Zubat in the cave.

I've finished its EV training but it's not quite a Garchomp yet. I got distracted by other stuff but hopefully this is something I can slowly work on. It's kinda demoralizing seeing so many empty boxes and just my barebones playthrough party in the game, though, and I'm already getting emotional about the idea of moving my Cherrim from it... so I might look into trading it to a ROM on one of my old flash carts and seeing if I can like... clone it on an emulator or something. .__. That way I could send it forward AND keep it on my old cartridge. We'll see!

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Log Update #21

Two updates in one month! I'm trying not to let it go so long so I'm not trying to talk about 10 games at once, but it doesn't matter so much because I haven't been playing a lot lately anyway. The next FFXIV patch is the new savage tier and this is the first time I've had my crafter/gatherers.... mostly levelled? So I've been prepping in the hopes that I can fund my own way through savage this time around. We'll see how it goes, but it hasn't left me a lot of time to do other things. But I do have to redeem an Xbox Game Pass subscription that Discord gave me like 3 years ago that finally expires next week sooo I'd like to activate that and try to play a lot off of it before it makes me pay. So I think the next couple months will be busier!


I quite enjoyed this and I'm glad the multiple endings prompt for this month gave me a chance to finally play it. The main hook of identifying plants choosing the correct ones to solve puzzles or help customers is great. The exploration is well done and meshes really well with the tone and the pace of the game. I really loved the different ways you had to identify plants. Usually customers ask for a plant by name and then you have to flip through your field guide and compare the hand drawn features to the plant on your greenhouse shelf to identify the plant and give them the right one. Sometimes they say they heard about a plant that will "help improve memory" and you have to pour over the descriptions to piece together what they need. You can write a tag for a plant to label it once you've confirmed what it is or even just to make a note if you think you know what it is but aren't 100% sure yet.

As for the multiple endings... I really wish there were an easier way to track it. I realized after playing through the game twice that it does actually hold a save at the start of each day so you can return and make different decisions, but I wish there were more than that. Not all endings give you an achievement but they do all seem to have a number, even if they're bad ends. I have no idea how many I've gotten or how many there are, though. It would also be easier if there were a way to track decision points, maybe? Although... now that I type that out, I suppose you sort of can because it logs the conversation every time an important NPC visits you. So I guess you can at least go back that way. *pauses writing this to do so* OKAY that wasn't so bad, although it was still kind of awkward.

I think maybe I'd find the branching paths to get the different endings better if I hadn't just replayed Papers Please. They're very similar games mechanically, where the decisions you make are based on responses to scripted NPCs visiting you on certain days, but I feel like the way the paths were presented in PP just worked a lot better for getting multiple endings. It also had a tracker showing your endings.

I was also a bit sad that there wasn't an endless mode. I still had like 15 plants to identify when the game ended and I kinda thought maybe once the story was over it would let me do sort of an infinite stream of customers needing random plants so I could finish them all that way. But no, my librarian friend showed up and all at once, rapidfire asked me what all the plants were in one visit. It was kind of anticlimactic, even if it was nice to officially put a name to some plants I'd had since the very beginning. I think they missed a great opportunity here to bring me back to the game periodically!


I've been playing this on and off lately while I watch TV with my mom. It's a game with no dialogue, but it tells the story of two friends who are next door neighbours via the environments. For example one level featured a collapsing dinosaur skeleton spread throughout the level that you had to maneuvre around and at the end it shows a little tableau of the real life situation the level was based on (in this case, trying to retrieve a paper airplane from a dinosaur skeleton's mouth and you can tell they're about to tip it over). The mechanics of the game are all about rewinding time or moving it forward. The characters walk along a set path but can interact with certain objects to make something "stick", like putting a lantern on a hopping bug to light it as it hops out of your reach, retrieving it again elsewhere in the level (the light and similar mechanics are static even as you move forward or backward through time). It started out pretty basic but as I go through, the puzzles get more and more interesting and I'm really enjoying it. I am however a bit stuck on a level so I've let it sit for a few days in the hopes that when I go back I'll have an epiphany... which has happened a few times! So I'm holding out hope.

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Log Update #22

I did the thing again so get ready for a really, really long entry... oops! (Also how ridiculous is the above list? Why did I beat so many games without updating again???) I'm actually super psyched to talk about some of the games I'm currently playing and about to start but hopefully I'll have time for it in the next entry.


I'm still not interested in where the story in these patches has been going. I really hoped we'd wrap the plot up this patch so that all of 6.5 could be dedicated to setting up the next expansion but nope, they're dragging this out even further. I've never been less excited for patches lol.

Though at the very least, this patch had the new raid tier and I actually kind of love it. I am entirely ambivalent to the third fight which I found obscenely boring (hopefully savage is better?) but oh my god the others are all great. My static has just about seen all the mechanics in p10s and I think it's my favourite fight in the whole game. As I mentioned a while ago, I've switched to DRK for this tier (my original main! It's like coming home!) and one of the tankbusters in 10 literally yeets you across the arena and it's so much fun. Best possible tier to have switched to tank for. I'm really pleased that I'm enjoying it, too, 'cause I was a little worried being tank (and main tank at that!) would be too much responsibility but it seems to be going well so far. :) My parses have been pretty decent thus far too, which was something I worried about. My very first parse was blue! I've never parsed blue on the get go in a fight before hahaha.


Also! I got really into crafting/gathering the last few months and this was the very first tier I ever made my own gear/food/pots for, which was also very satisfying. The thought of doing it again every time a new gear tier drops has me horrified though.


Discord gave me an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate trial like 2 years ago and the deadline to accept it finally rolled up the other month, so since the end of May I've been trying to get my "money's worth" because I have no intention of renewing it. ($20+ per month? They are insane.) I think where it has shined for me, that will be evident from the rest of the games in this entry, is letting me play a lot of smaller indie titles that I normally wouldn't have taken a chance on at $15-20 a pop. This game in particular had been on my Steam wishlist for ages and I never bothered to pick it up even though it goes very cheap. But I did grab it and play it off Game Pass and it was... fine. I'm glad I didn't buy it but I also kind of wish I hadn't finished it.

For the most part it was fun. I liked most of the puzzles, but my gripe with the game was that the progression always seemed so random. It rarely felt like the levels built on each other. They introduced all the mechanics very early and while puzzles did get more complex as the game went on, I never erally felt like I was learning anything from most levels. There were even some levels near the very end where the solution made me go "ohhh so that's how that works" and I feel like those kinds of levels should have been, you know, level 10 and not level 56. I wasn't having fun by the end but sunk cost fallacy made me finish.


This was my game challenge game for June. A Twitter friend picked it out for me since it had just come out. (The theme was that we had to have someone choose our game for us.) It turned out to be a cute little game and I had fun.

It's basically your typical sidescrolling puzzle platformer. A lot of the beginning felt almost... overly standard. Like the tutorial puzzles in the first couple chapters were definitely just going through the motions of "here's how you drag a box over to climb it and reach a higher area" sort of thing that every puzzle-platformer has. But things did eventually improve. I really liked the puzzles near the end where timing for recalling Mui (your cat/monkey partner) really mattered for sneaking past he enemies. It felt very tense in the best of ways.


Speaking of Mui I would die for him.


This was my challenge game for July. The theme was swords and with a quick glance through my Game Pass "to play" list, this was the only game I saw where the main character definitively had a sword. (I realized later that Tunic was alos on my list, but more on that later.) It looked cute so I gave it a shot!

I thought it was a very fun game and the characters and maps were cute and colourful. I largely enjoyed the gameplay loop of getting daily tasks to do around trying to continue the main story and picking up random sidequests here and there to boot. I think maybe where the game fumbles a bit is it takes too many of the daily quests to level up properly. Every day you get 2-3 quests and they come in three different categories. Whichever ones you complete will give experience toward those categories to level up the towns. Each day you only get quests for the town you spent the night in and you don't get any control over what kind of quests you get. So if you're trying to level up... uh... I've already forgotten the category names, but say you're levelling up the yellow category, it's entirely possible you won't even get a yellow quest the next day. And by the time you're trying to get up to level 4-5, the exp you get for each quest is so absymal. I had every intention of 100%ing the game because I was actually quite enjoying it, but when I started to realize how long it would take to max everything out, I got discouraged pretty quickly and figured my time was better spent elsewhere.

The way the gameplay works is really good though. You get a bunch of different weapons/tools and you can level them up in different town shops, usually gated by town levels. (Although... some of the upgrades were so much grindier than others and that wasn't fun either.) But you can also complete achievement-like tasks to equip special skills that do all kinds of things, from giving you extra HP or stamina to adding abilities to specific weapons. You can equip more of them as the game goes on and it'll give you hints for how to unlock more achievements to get new skills. It was quite satisfying to work towards. Battle itself was pretty responsive with different ways you need to approach different enemies rather than always brute forcing it. There was actually a reason to switch around and try different weapons, though I was suuuper partial to the umbrella which played like a quick rapier. (I did try to use the more traditional slashing sword in the endgame to stick with the spirit of the game challenge!)


Also you can dress up in cute hats and backpacks. What's not to love? This was my nerd look.


Another Game Pass game! I've had my eye on this one for a while and I was very happy to see it in the game list so I could try it. It's basically like... a visual illusion puzzle game? You can interact with the world based on what you see rather than what "is". So like if you pick up a chess piece that you're very close to so it looks really big on the screen, it'll be really big when you pick it up. And then while holding it you can turn and hold it up against the far side of the room so it looks small in its surroundings and it will be smaller when you set it down. You use those and similar mechanics throughout the game to figure out how to progress through the levels, all the while uncovering the mystery of what's going on in the dreamscape you're in.

I absolutely loved how creative this game is, but the nature of how everything was sort of... not concrete in what it could be means it was the very first time playing a video game where I couldn't play for long sessions because I'd start to get motion sickness. I never get motion sickness from games but all the changing perspectives really messed with me this time.


I played the first of these games last year and counting them as three games kind of feels like cheating since for the most part they are very short, but whatever. I'm already past the amount of games I challenged myself to play and they're distinct games with credits even if the Game Pass version is a bundle of all three so I'm counting them separate!

I quite like these games. I replayed the first since it's so short and I figured I should refresh myself on them and I was pretty glad I did. They're very silly and the writing is funny, even if quite simple. If I had been doing my game journal last year, I probably would have mentioned how the first game is sort of... disappointingly short. It felt a lot more like a tech demo or a gamejam game than something full-fledged, but the later entries definitely built on the good base it had and felt more fleshed out. The second game had a lot more polish and a more filled in setting and the third game blew the others out of the water with a big map, better quest tracking, and a little scooter you could pull out to go fast ahaha. It also had a bigger and better twist and fakeout credits. (And in those fakeout credits were someone I went to school with because they had a credits song and had finished thanking everyone who worked on/around the game and went "well... we have to fill more space so here's the credits from a random episode of Degrassi.)



Anyway, very fun games. Simple but funny writing and I highly recommend them for a fun and relaxing afternoon.


Okay so... I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to. Or maybe as much as I expected to, I dunno. I highly recommend getting this and tossing on a podcast and then just cleaning away. It's great fun. I finished career mode and did the Final Fantasy VII dlc.

I thought the game was pretty funny. The story that unfolds as you do career mode is very weird but the final job [ Spoiler: where you uncover an ancient temple dedicated to you and your magic water that predicted every job you took on in ancient hieroglyphs ] was so absurd I loved it. I haven't played a lot of these "simulator" games, but I have noticed that the narrative direction they seem to take is having very bizarre customers give you job orders and I think it's kind of great. Without the silly writing for this (and PC Building Simulator, which I also played a lot of this year but never "beat" so I haven't written about it), I think the game would be a much more tedious process. I'm very impressed at how many of these seem to have such good writers for the NPC interactions despite you never actually meeting anyone else. It could so easily be a total afterthought to these kinds of games where it doesn't so much matter why you're doing what you're doing but I really appreciate how solid the writing is all the same.

I did have a few issues with the game. It kinda felt like the level pacing ramped up too quick, where I'd start with a small job and suddenly every other job was taking me 2 hours to complete. I would have preferred more smaller scale jobs weaved in that weren't just vehicles in a garage. The super huge levels were especially exhausting when I ran into a glitch that had me redo almost the entirety of the subway level three times because it kept not saving my progress when I'd finish. It was the worst, which sucks because until that happened it had actually been one of my favourite levels lol.

It also got kind of... tedious in the middle before I managed to buy this one super op nozzle that saw me through to the end. Basically in order to up the difficulty, since they couldn't really increase the level size as they've already thrown such massive jobs at you, they increase the grime level. So instead of being able to use your big wide spray to cover more ground, you have to use the little powerful ones to get rid of caked on grime and rust. And like... that's fine in theory, but it's so frustrating when the entire thing is like that and you're cleaning at a snail's pace because you can't cover much ground at all. They have soap nozzles that will help deal with that stuff in a wider area, but you hold that down for about 10 seconds and you've run the whole bottle out and then you have to pay to get more and there's only a finite amount so I never wanted to in case it got worse. I think if the soap functioned differently, like if you sprayed it on an area and that made the whole area easier to clean with any nozzle instead of cleaning a smaller area better... idk. I basically never used the soap, it felt way too useless and that was annoying.



(The first thing I did was draw a Cherrim on the side of a van so that's the only screenshot I have to share, even if I drew much better ones on better surfaces later.)


This is such an interesting game. It was free to play in full on the eshop this past weekend so I gave it a shot and I'm glad I did, although I do feel a bit bad for finishing it and not having to pay a cent. :x

The premise of this game is that you wake up in an unknown house with no idea how you got there. There is someone there taking care of you, but you can't understand anything they say and you can't read any of the words around the house. Eventually it seems that they will follow you around and tell you what things are if you point to them, so you spend the next week wandering around trying to decipher the language around you. The core translation mechanic reminded me a lot of Heaven's Vault (which I also never wrote about here since I played it last year during my digital journal hiatus), but HV's was more hand-holdy in that it would show hints of words that were similar even if you didn't have any reason to understand yet that they were similar. And the characters would talk out the options and context more. But this one drops you in much blinder. You don't get any hints, you just get the option to think back to any time the word was said aloud (with a screenshot of what was on screen for context). There are dream sequences at the end of each day where you get a heavy hint at a word, but the words it gives are much more abstract so they aren't immediately helpful.

There's something I love about games in general, especially games with puzzles or harder mechanics where like... I just love the feeling of being overwhelmed at the start and then eventually being able to look back at how far I've come. You don't get that with games where the progression is all about levelling to get stronger. This is a weird comparison, but playing this game felt a lot like high end raiding in Final Fantasy XIV. At the start of nearly every savage fight I've done, there's some mechanic where it feels so complex to read and execute correctly that it feels like I'll never figure it out. But fast forward a few weeks and I can do it without thinking about it! To an extent that's what playing this game felt like. At the start I was making such wild guesses for words, if I could even venture a guess at all, and so often I'd get a line of dialogue that totally invalidated my guess and left me at square one. Any time I'd get a cutscene conversation, it would just be this long stream of words that meant nothing to me. But slooowly I filled in the context with my interpretation and started to understand what was happening. I think my absolute favourite part of the game was when a word that had stumped me for "weeks" of playthroughs was suddenly crystal clear in such a fascinating way that made my heart sink. There was no way I could have guessed it before but hoo boy did it shed new light on the situation and suddenly a whole lot made sense.



I did have to look up some stuff to get the endings. While I did like that the game doesn't hold your hand for any translation stuff, that also means there's just no clarity at all for the correct responses in some scenes. So I didn't actually feel bad looking up these things. But one thing I did notice while looking for what I needed was that a lot of people seem to approach the game the same way. Whenever I made a guess, I'd enter the word with a question mark. So if I wasn't certain with my guess, I'd write "book?". I noticed in many screenshots of the game that a lot of people played the same way! When I became more sure of most of my guesses, I'd go in and edit the question mark out and I always felt a little bit silly for doing it. Seeing that others obviously did the same thing made me feel a certain kind of way for some reason, though. It's very cute how humans are so the same, even across multiple languages.

Speaking of, I do think that the game could have been a little better localized. It's a Japanese game but the words are based on English... except sometimes the words are a bit more like Engrish. But knowing Japanese helped me out quite a bit because I was able to shift my thinking a bit to see what the creators were going for. For example, when you get asked a question like "do you understand?", the correct answer isn't "yes", it's to parrot back "understand", because you'd be more likely to do that in Japanese. Similarly, there were some word structures that just didn't really make sense in English but were basically literal translations of what you'd say in Japanese. And one of my favourite oddities is like... so the words almost always correspond in length to an English word. So the word for "book" has four characters and the two in the middle are the same. (But the characters aren't consistent through all the words, so just because you know "#**%" is book doesn't mean that "look" would have "**%" at the end.) But there's one word that they give you in one of the memory flashbacks "sin" that has this much longer x that people have ciphered out to be "punish". And that's because the Japanese word for both 罰 (batsu) means both and when the creators were building out the words in English to cipher into a mystery, they picked the wrong one lol. You run into a few similar issues where a word they specifically give you is in plural but the letter length corresponds to the singular, since Japanese doesn't have plural words. Stuff like that helped me fuddle my way through some translations but I think it would be much more frustrating for people who didn't know to expect it, so it's kind of a shame the localization wasn't a bit more heavy-handed with fixing that sort of thing.



I liked this game a lot! I has a very clean art style and a great concept, but I was quite sad that it was so short. This was another one that was free for the weekend on Switch and I can't fathom why since you can beat the whole thing in about an hour or two. Wouldn't it make more sense to make free trial games ones that are either too long to feasibly complete during a free weekend (week? it was like a 5 day window) or ones where the replayability is so high that you'd want to keep going back? Weird.


Anyway, it's a cute little puzzle game where you insert scenes and characters to fulfill a prompt. The characters have different personalities that you come to understand and play around with and it's just a lot of fun. Even though I don't understand why they made it temporarily free... maybe it worked? Because I think at some point I'd probably buy it on deep discount, especially since it's getting more levels via DLC soon. Maybe if I give it a year or two I'll forget all the simple solutions and it'll be like playing it fresh again.


Another Game Pass game... I've put the console down as Xbox because this one I actually streamed. I guess since Game Pass is a Microsoft thing, it makes sense it really only works in Windows, but you can get it going on a Steam Deck without installing Windows by some little workarounds using a browser kiosk. So I did that and played this game, because it doesn't rely much on good timing in case the latency was too bad. (And the latency was generally fine, but if I was too far away from the wifi source, it got really choppy and would sometimes crash.)

Anyway! Dordogne is absolutely gorgeous. It's like walking through a watercolour painting and a picture book all at the same time. It's a bittersweet little game that starts with the protagonist going to pack up her estranged grandmother's house against her parents' wishes after her death and the game jumps back and forth between the present day and her last summer visit with her grandmother when she was around age 8. The present is dreary and muted but her childhood is full of colour and fun.

I liked the premise of this game and it was cute enough to get through, but it maybe felt a bit... long for what it was? Well, not even long, the pacing of the story itself was fine, but I think the execution faltered a bit. The game really wants you to explore and examine everything around you, but the problem is you're basically always confined to the house in both childhood and adulthood, with childhood granting you access to a few other one-off places to check. This means you spend most of your time retracing your steps over and over and over again because every time you visit a point to examine, Mimi will have something new to say about it. And even if you aren't into flavour text, one of the core mechanics of the game is still wandering around and collecting things for your scrapbook, whether they're stickers, "words" to create poems, sounds, or photos. (Although sounds and photos can only be collected in certain points, which also feels annoying because I'd love to take photos of just about every area of the game.) To make this extra annoying, you walk soooo slooooowly in this game. Sometimes you get the ability to run as a kid but never in the areas you'd be rehashing. By the end I was making the rounds really quickly and stopped trying to fill in my collection, which was a shame because of how the collection is used.

Each chapter starts with a brief glimpse at adulthood, with Mimi receiving and replying to texts from friends and family as she explores the house and garden. And then she'll find some keepsake that triggers a memory from her childhood summer and it will switch to that. Once you've played through the memory, Mimi finishes off the chapter by decorating a new page in her scrapbook. I actually really love this mechanic because it's such a cute way to make the collectibles feel more meaningful. Or, well, it should, but I think they botched the execution a bit. It's very creative because you get to use what you collected in the chapter to decorate, but it's waaaay too restrictive because you only get to use one of each media type. I was usually collecting at least a half dozen stickers in every chapter and they're trying to tell me that the happy-go-lucky 8-year-old protagonist is going to limit herself to ONE sticker on the page? It's absurd! Between that and the fact that you can only stop and take photos in restricted areas (meaning the one photo you get to use is always gonna turn out somewhat the same), it just feels bad when you're decorating. It's so discordant with the gameplay because you collect so many things across all the collectible categories and then you have to discard almost all of it. The poems you get to add to the page really shine, though, because you get to make a poem out of three of the words you choose. When you choose a word, you get a list of three different phrasings of potential lines in a poem, all kind of abstract and a bit poetic. You do that three times to make a little poem and they're abstract enough to work in any order. Then you get to add the lines to your scrapbook. It's really cute! But then your page looks so empty and sad that you just feel disappointed with it all.

Also I dunno if maybe it'll be patched in later, but you can't go back and replay chapters to try to get any collectibles you missed so that's just kind of annoying.



Cute game but unless it gets some decently significant updates, I don't know that I'd recommend it to anyone. (I stole the above screenshot off google because I wanted a screenshot to show off how pretty the game is but I'm not sure any of mine came out because of the awkward Steam Deck-y way I was playing... and my Steam Deck is two flights of stairs away anyway as I write this.)


I actually dropped a few games this session! I started to play them and then went "actually I'm not into this at all" and let myself quit, which I don't often do because I have sunk cost fallacy issues. But here they are:
Fantasian (iOS)
I wanted to play this for years before I finally got an iPad. The problem is, I got my iPad a couple years ago and I still didn't end up playing it. I had some unexpected costs come up and I can't really justify additional subscriptions right now, so I've cancelled my Apple Arcade subscription which is the only way to play Fantasian. Knowing my time would be up, I decided to really try to beat it this time. I'd started it once or twice in the past and played a few hours but I'd always given up. So I gave it a better shot this time and I just... I just couldn't get into it. I was so ready to love it, too, because it's basically a star-studded lineup! It's produced and written by Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy and Uematsu does the music! The backgrounds are all real life dioramas and you can the cool little tilt-shift feel from them, which I always thought was so impressive when they were still back in their promotional campaigns. I wanted to love this game so badly. But... it's really boring lol. You have to run everywhere (no warping) and while the battles are... fine? They aren't super engaging. The characters are not as interesting as they should be in a slow start RPG. I did really like the most recent party member I'd picked up, but I realized I just... I had to force myself to play it and with both Apple Arcade and Game Pass expiring within about a week of each other, I decided I'd rather prioritize all the games in Game Pass instead and set this one aside as a lost cause. It really is such a shame!

Tunic (PC)
I've been fascinated by this game ever since I heard about it a while back. I guess the idea is you get dropped into the game with no direction at all and as you wander through, you pick up pieces of the instruction manual (which looks like an oldschool manual you'd get with games that explained mechanics and showed off a few secrets!). I really love the idea of that as I'm really into game mechanics where you have to discover pieces of the game for yourself without instruction. I thought I remembered some talk about deciphering an ancient language but now I suspect I was simply confusing the fact that the manual is written in a fantasy language with mainly diagrams and maybe a few English words for extra explanation. (Unless later there is some deciphering? Who knows!) Anyway, in theory I love the idea, but in practice, the enemies were just so hard. I played long enough to get a sword but I sure suffered on my way to it. And then suddenly I thought maybe I was on easy street but I went to the only other place it felt like I had access to and continually had my ass handed to me so I just... gave up. I wasn't really having fun and nothing about the gameplay at the beginning was really sucking me in so I dropped it. I'm very glad I didn't spend like $40 on this game because I would have been very upset about it! So thank you, Game Pass trial, you saved my life.


...Phew, all done! Hopefully there aren't too many typos because I am not proofreading all that. Now to go to bed instead of think about how my manga journal has gone even longer without an update. Might just have to abandon that one for dead at this point.

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Log Update #22

I put off updating again but mostly because I really wanted to give Oxenfree II another chance before I wrote about it. But then I could never bring myself to finish my second playthrough so I guess it's getting a bad review instead!

And then I wrote most of this post in October and, for whatever reason, put off updating even longer so now it's December and I have a bunch more games to write about.

Also................ WE ARE ALL GOING TO BE VERY NICE AND PRETEND MY JOURNAL STILL LOOKS GOOD ON XENFORO.... T_T I miss my cute handwritten-style fonts but not enough to be a diabolical admin and hardcode them into this thread. Maybe one day I'll go through my posts and adjust things to look nice again but we'll see if maybe I can bribe Sheep into letting me set all my fave fonts as defaults too. :3c But the year's almost over and I'll prob do a new style for next year's journal anyway.


These were the last of my Game Pass games. I'm glad they were on there because I don't think I ever would have taken a chance on them otherwise and while I did enjoy the characters a lot, I'm not sure I liked the gameplay loops enough to have felt it was worth my money if I'd bought the games outright. Not at their current price points anyway.

The gist of the game is that you run a coffee shop in a modern world inhabited by different fantasy races and you help people work out interpersonal drama that tends to relate to their racial issues, though not always. For example, one of your regulars is a werewolf and a subplot of the game is every time he comes in you try to figure out what's in a certain tea he heard of that helps manage the symptoms of the full moon. Another regular is a catgirl who's trying to break into showbiz while dealing with her father (an ex-showbiz manager himself) hating how scummy her current manager is. The characters are all interesting and the core gameplay loop involves making them their drinks, whether it's a set recipe or making something up that they might like. You can even do the latte art!


That said, it's largely a kinetic novel. There aren't dialogue choices so the only agency you as a player have is whether you get their drink right. I didn't enjoy the gameplay so much as a result because it usually didn't feel like it mattered if I got the drink right or not and that's all I could do. It's especially frustrating because the twist of the first game is that [ Spoiler: you, the cafe owner, are actually the offspring of the alien who keeps showing up in your cafe, with your special ability being time travel. You are actually repeating the weeks of the game and upon replaying a second time, your character will say extra things that imply they already know new visitors or how things will turn out. But that's not... very satisfying. I think it would have been much more interesting if we had dialogue choices all through the game and either they added new ones that let us share info we shouldn't know yet or include that the first time and make it easier for the player to figure out the twist themselves based on the reaction. ] I just don't really feel like a game where the player character is a faceless expert of chatting with people is served by not having any dialogue options. Factor in how finnicky the drinks are (your primary ingredient is most important but the order of your secondary ingredients can matter too which sucks when you're trying to figure out two ingredients and they could be in any order -_-) and your choice-making in the game just feels so hindered in ways that just don't serve the story.


That said, I did enjoy my time playing the game and I liked the sequel too. The pixel art is gorgeous and the animations feel nice and cozy for what they are. The pacing is good and the characters are worth getting to know.


I saw on Twitter that there's a secret mode in Unpacking where if you put *nothing* away, you'll still clear the level with a black star instead of a gold star. So of course I had to check it out! It is true, if you find a way to fit everything on the floor or put things in places they don't belong (like toasters in the bathroom, underwear in the kitchen drawers, etc.) then you get a black star and get to move onto the next level. I will admit by the end when you're filling an entire house it was getting pretty tedious in a way the proper playstyle just isn't, but the sheer ecstasy of being able to just absolutely destroy the terrible boyfriend's apartment upon moving in was just perfect. I'll put my degree front and centre on the bed thank you very much.



Well... I really wanted to love this game. Oxenfree is one of my favourite games and I love how it's designed, the characters, the mystery, the way things turn out depending on your dialogue choices (or even if you don't make any choices at all). It's just plain fun.

And then there's Oxenfree II.

I admit I didn't look into this game at all. I never watched a single trailer, I ignored news about it besides the release date announcement. I was as blind as I could possibly be going into it, which is exactly how I wanted it to be. And I did not like it!

I think I gave it a proper chance. I found it kind of hard to get into even on my first playthrough. I'd catch myself tabbing to the other monitor every few minutes to check twitter and discord constantly. The environment was exactly as pretty as before, but the maps were bigger and traversing them just takes so long... The dialogue isn't nearly as engaging as the first game and because you spend basically the whole story with just Riley and Jacob and then faceless NPCs on the walkie talkies, it feels a lot more lonely.

There are some teenagers who sort of act as the main antagonists of the game, sabotaging you (or is it the other way around? They honestly don't feel like much of a threat for the entire game), but the game never really introduces you to them in the first place. You get an overview of who they are and then suddenly Jacob has major beef with one of them and the other you never learn any motivation for and if you don't know the exact things to say to these absolute strangers who you have never met before, you get (presumably) locked out of major story beats. When I finished the game I still had no idea what was going on. All I could glean was that Olivia, their ringleader, had made a deal with Alex from the first game to, what, swap bodies??? I'm still unclear.

I will admit there was one point where I failed at a critical moment -- I had to go block off an escape route or something but I went the wrong way to do it and couldn't make it in time and Olivia escaped. Between that and not convincing one of her cronies in my first playthrough, I worry it locked me out of essential story explanation and it meant I had no idea what was going on at the end. This was just so... deeply unsatisfying. There were similar mysteries in the first game where you didn't get the whole story with just one playthrough, but at least that first playthrough had a better sense of closure. You might be missing context and a whole side story by only playing once, but you got to know the main characters and their motivations. You might not befriend or save everyone, but you come away with a good idea of what choices you could make next time to get a different ending.

I also... well, okay, maybe my first playthrough was just bad. I didn't actually finish my second one because I don't find the game very engaging, but I will admit that I really slacked on the radio/walkie stuff in my first playthough. I completely missed one of the radio NPCs because you have to tune into a specific station early on and I guess I just didn't. You're lowkey supposed to check in with every single walkie NPC on every map, but I'd often forget to do that. I guess that's why the maps were so big, but I don't like walking around while conversations are happening because if you walk into a plot trigger it drops the conversation you were happening and that can happen even while having the conversation that often starts with Jacob as you walk into a new map. -_- So there's not actually enough space in the maps to have all your conversations while walking, meaning the ideal way to play for me to ensure you hear everything is to stand around in one spot the entire time you talk to like 5 people in sequence and then you silently traverse the map to the next one. Even like... they added a note in this game that's like "you can move onto the next map and your conversation will contiunue!" so they want you to be walking around as these conversations happen. Obviously, since it's insane to just stand there and ruin the pacing... but the very first time I noticed that note and went "oh good!" and moved onto the next map, I took like 4 steps in the new map and my conversation was immediately overwritten by a story trigger conversation. This was kind of a problem I had with the first game, but I'd really hoped they'd fix it this time. I think it's worse, though, since at least with the first game, all your conversations were with people on the screen with you. This time even if you're talking to Jacob on screen with you, you can be interrupted by the walkies out of nowhere. Or if you're having a walkie conversation, there's no body language to watch out for that might imply someone is speeding up to go look at something that will stop the conversation for another one. It's just... bad. I don't like it and it made me not want to play.

Um... besides the fact that I didn't like how most of this game was, I didn't hate the new mechanics in theory. I liked the spatial tears that let us go into the past (especially the one near the end where you could change the time period of it). I liked being able to contact people on the walkies even if it was kind of lonely -- it would have been nicer to meet up with them here and there, maybe. I wish we met with the teens more often and had more of a chance to talk before they got immediately hostile. I still want to finish my second playthrough because I've been a lot more thorough with it and I do think I have a better chance at learning more this time since I've interacted with people more consistently, so maybe I'll find the ending more satisfying. But we'll see. (Man I didn't even talk about how I didn't like how they implemented the characters from the first game but frankly I still don't really understand parts of that!)

This was really rambly but I also beat this game like a month and a half ago now and only had bits of notes I'd written out lol. u_u


I got this for free through Epic however long ago and it got picked as my RNG game for September's game theme. I powered through it all in one or two days and really enjoyed it. I wish I'd taken some notes when I played it because now I can't remember what I wanted to say about it, if anything.

The story is you're a chronically ill woman whose husband went searching for a cure for your mysterious illness that's been passed down through your family, but he went missing on an island off the coast of Tahiti so you go after him and on the island, you discover something about your illness that changes everything you thought you knew about your past. (With a healthy dose of Lovecraftian themes to boot, but, like, not the racist ones.)



Everywhere you go is absolutely gorgeous, from the bright sunny beaches to the watery caves. I loved the dripfeed of story and the way you slowly work out what happened to your husband and his crew. The puzzles to move through everything were quite clever. The game didn't overstay its welcome and it switched up the environment enough that I never got tired. Some places were also just breathtaking! Highly recommend.


I replayed this because I was gonna go to the local art show that the devs would be attending the launch for. I RSVP'd for my brother and I and then... his flight got cancelled two days in a row and the one he actually came in on arrived basically at the time the event started. :'( I'm still gonna try to make it down there to see the gallery but I'm kinda bummed I missed out on meeting the devs. I will update here again after, I just. Felt like I needed to explain why I replayed this again so soon lol. (Game is great, as ever!)

[ December edit: I wrote most of that in October when I still planned on making it... but alas my mom was in a car accident at the start of the month and I ended up going to stay with her and did not have time to make it out to the art gallery showing before it ended! Wahh! ]


Decided recently I wanted to test out more of the emulators on my Steam Deck so I tried to play Banjo Kazooie for the third time and gave up deciding the game simply isn't for me. (I think it's a hate crime to do two water-based levels in a row.) Anyway, the game I moved onto after that was the GBA version of Rhythm Heaven. The DS version is one of my fave games of all time and I'd never actually played the first in the series before, so it was interesting to see what minigames/characters were series staples from the start. I liked that I could hear melodies that got expanded on in later games in some of the minigames. :D

I was godawful at a bunch of these so I did not go for completion, but I did get a decent handful of perfects while playing. I could see myself picking this up for one-offs before bed every so often, but mostly it just made me want to replay the DS version which I don't think emulates well. Wahh.


Have I talked about this yet? I don't think I have. I picked this up off Game Pass a few months ago and it was the only time I went "okay, no, I need to own this for real" and dropped everything to buy it on Steam instead. It's basically a minigame aggregate wrapped in a retro PC theme. The idea is you're in the age of usenet and dial up and you download games from various sources, some legally and some cracked. You unlock a little more story as you obtain and play the games but mostly they're just standalone.

I haven't actually played all the games yet--I kept thinking I'd be able to update my journal when I was all done but some of them require a lot of thought so I've been slow to get through them. There's sort of a solitaire, a weird version of hanafuda, and then a bunch of other games. My favourite for whatever reason is a game meant to replicate building model kits. You clip all the pieces out of the grid they come in, you figure out how to put them together, you paint them (and can even mask off parts with tape so you only paint the part you want), and then... you're done. It seems kind of weird but it's SO relaxing. I watched like 4 whole anime series just putting these things together.

I also really love this one minigame where you're trying to automate various food cafeterias and you need to set up systems of conveyor belts and machines to create any possible order. It's rough to figure out because the instructions are so minimal but sooo satsifying to get right.
[this is where I stopped writing my entry for October and I haven't touched this game since, but I still want to go back and play everything in it!]

Not really sure what to say about this besides "it was nice that the alliance raid wasn't a total snoozefest". The MSQ was... okay. It went basically where I thought it would and it was boring for it. I am so thrilled that the patches are over (besides 6.55 of course) because it means we're done with this awkward FF4 rehash. I think the best marker of how bored I was with the plot was the way I stopped in the Crystarium for half an hour when the MSQ took me there because somehow I found out there were fishing holes there and I suddenly decided I had to find them all. Far more interesting than plot, right?

Anyway in just general FF14 stuff, I haven't been up to a whole lot. My static cleared p12s part 1 recently. It took us a while but we've been having scheduling issues a lot this tier. We even had to ditch prog for this last week before we break for like a month because of things cropping up, but all the same I'm excited to be on part 2. Tanking has been really rewarding. :>

The only other thing of note that I can think of is the Cloud Server beta test they did a couple weeks ago. The servers were on the east coast of NA and my ping to them was 10ms. 10 ms!!!!! Oh it was glorious!!! I did a Fall Guys on my very first night on the server and won it right there and then on my first try, even though I struggled a bit getting used to, like, things actually happening on screen as the actual attacks and AOEs happened. Wild! Unheard of! I did most of Eden, all of the 70 and 80 Alliance Raids, and then because I thought it would be funny to get to Hydaelyn, I did all of 6.0 too?? Wild.


I made a giant roe woman because I didn't want there to be record of me playing anyone tall because tall people have no rights. n_n But I named her Hydaelyn's Favourite and she was a Warrior main (with MCH picked up because I wanted to know what my dps main played like with good ping and it was So Good). It made me finally learn how to play WAR past level 50 (where I'd promptly dropped it as my tank job to become a DRK main upon getting into Heavensward) and ohhhh my god it's just an absolute beast in dungeons. There were sooo many times where I was undergeared, the healer was undergeared, everyone was undergeared and I didn't even break a sweat on massive pulls. It's insane.

One thing I really loved about the Cloud test though was just the mix of people. They only had the one data centre, so everyone worldwide crammed onto this NA server. Since my sleep schedule is currently ""oops"", I ended up playing largely with Japanese players and it was fun trying to remember how to speak Japanese on the spot and otherwise trying to remember the set auto-translation phrases. My fave was this one time I joined a Zodiark party finder to help someone clear (because not enough people were in duty finder for things to pop after the first few days) and the person was immediately like "oh no I don't speak any English, what do we do?" (in Japanese) when I joined and another person was like "chill, it's not like this will be hard, that's what auto-translate is for". It was very cute lol. (And it was, of course, fine, because warrior can carry anything.) It was interesting seeing how different regional cultures approach the game.

Related to regional cultures, another great thing was the way the Other tab was mostly just housing ads. So like, instead of infinite crappy clubs, it was people who'd done something cool with their free house for the week. I went around with Faf (who had made my main wol as her charater on the Cloud Server LOL thank u for spreading the Cherrim love) on the last day just checking out some of the houses and it was actually really impressive what people had done with only a week. (How on earth did they get all those Verdant Partitions!?) I think my favourite was an elaborate maze someone had created in a large house that used every inch of the house. I also loved the house where someone had created several different photo op areas to gpose in. The one with the little coloured housefronts was so cute!


The last highlight was some of the memey names people came up with for their temporary I-only-exist-for-a-week characters. I mean, I went with Hydaelyn's Favourite and all, but it was really funny this one time I was in someone's Zodiark trial party finder because I ended up in there and my cotank was "Zodiark's Babygirl" so we were basically cousins LMAO.

I wish the cloud server had lasted two weeks instead of one. I'd also love if they just randomly did this once a year or something. The transient vibe of the server, the mix of people and gaming cultures, there was just something kinda magical about it and I'd love to see it back. I know it wouldn't have the population without them requesting a test but a girl can dream. It just won't quite be the same if/when they ever instate cross-DC travel. Ah well, at least I got to experience it at all. Although I do wish I'd been able to be there when the week was up! The end of the server coincided with the end of my raid night so I wasn't able to be there wahh. :(


I played this for my October game-along game. (Horror was the theme, which this... sort of fit. I don't play enough horror to really have had anything to play that wouldn't have just been a repeat of last year's theme game.) I haven't replayed this in years and while I remembered most of the main story beats too well, I was pleasantly surprised that I'd forgot almost all of the details of each case.

It was also nice playing on Switch where trophies don't exist because it meant I wasn't worried about going back in for completion. If there were any characters I got a bit curious about refreshing their social links for or w/e, I just read the script on a wiki instead of putting in the effort. I've platinumed every DR game on the Vita and might have been tempted to do it again if I'd played this on Steam or something.


I picked FFV as my retro game for November. It was once again down to the wire to complete it, but I did manage it! (Thank u gp for not posting the new theme until 15 minutes after I collapsed over the finish line while the credits were rolling.) I played the GBA version on my Steam Deck.

Anyway, this is one of my favourite Final Fantasy games now! I was so surprised at how much I took to it. It feels so modern in basically everything but graphics. The story went places I didn't think stories really went in that era of games and the characters were so good. Not a ton of detail for most of them but they were fairly fleshed out for what the game had and I really liked the way they interacted with the plot. And I'm ALWAYS here for a majority female main cast. :D

But mainly the gameplay was so good! I am always here for FF's ATB system and whatever job system they put on top of it and FF5's is one of the best. As you level up your jobs, you gain abilities from those jobs permanently that you can equip as a secondary trait to any other job. So like, if you level up Monk, you get the equippable trait to go "barehanded" on other jobs, meaning if you don't equip a weapon, you'll do as much damage as a monk would without one. Or for the mages, if you level up White Mage enough, you can straight up just use ALL the White Mage spells as a secondary trait on something else. And anyone can be any job and there's no inherent traits that makes the girls better at white mage and the boys better at physical attacking or anything like that. It's so good!!

I had most everyone in Freelancer for the ending since if you mastered a job, you got all of its stats added to Freelancers (aka jobless) and could equip two abilities instead of one. I think my main jobs for the game were largely:
- Lenna: Knight / Magic Knight / Dragoon
- Faris: Ninja / Thief / Magic Knight
- Krile: White Mage (for the cat ears!) / Blue Mage / Geomancer / Monk
- Bartz: Time Mage / Black/White/Red Mage / Dancer / Bard

It's a mixed blessing that I picked the game for the theme since it meant I actually finished it within the month, but it also meant I had to rush it at the end to make sure I hit the deadline. I could have grinded these jobs for ages... I intended to go back but I feel like it's probably not happening. Next time I play I'll be more thorough!

I now only have a handful of mainline Final Fantasies to play before I can say I've at least played all of them (I/II/XI/XVI). I'd have played I for this theme, but there's some hints that Krile is important in XIV for the next expansion and since she's inspired by the character of the same name in FF5, I wanted to play this one the same way I played FF4 in the leadup to Endwalker. (And speaking of XIV, I loved how many references to FF5 there are in it! As I went through FF5 I was just thrilled every time I ran into something I recognized from XIV.)


I preordered this when it came out on Steam/modern consoles, but I ended up not playing it because it felt like it was too soon since my last playthrough (which I believe was in 2020?). But I finally felt really nostalgic for it recently and played through it all in roughly a weekend. It looks soooo good in its new format. I think it's not as fun when you're trying to control where you go with a control stick on a controller vs a stylus on the DS touch pad (and actually struggled with juggling the two characters near the end with precise directional jumps near another node) but on the whole, great port.

I just love this game so much. The writing is so good, the game design is so good, the characters are so memorable and lively, and it's just such a great game. Please play it!!!


I got my brother to buy the game when I visited him in June/July but he didn't get too far. I'm hoping we'll have time to sit down and get him through the game while he's home for Christmas these next few days. Part of why I decided to play it myself was in anticipation of this--if I'm gonna get him to play while I watch, I knew I wouldn't want to play myself for ages again.


Google Play Pass was like a dollar a month for a few months as part of their Black Friday sale so I decided to check it out. I'm pretty impressed with how many games are on it so I downloaded a whole bunch and this was one of them.

This game was GREAT. It's basically all about breaking the fourth wall and trying to interact with anything you can to achieve your goal while your game narrator looks on in horror at what you're doing. It has some really endearing parts and it's just so creative. I felt like the ending was maybe a little blah but I just enjoyed myself so much going through everything.

I don't even really wanna spoil it because all the levels are so interesting, but one of my favourite bits was doing a little RPG game and then getting dropped in the same game but if it were a cash grabby clicker game lmao.


This is a crime investigation game merged with Picross, which is right up my alley so I was happy to see it as one of the free Epic games this year. I started this a while ago but it took me a while to really play it through, not aided by losing progress or something at some point and having to play half a case over again. My thoughts are... hmm.

I can usually suspend disbelief pretty well but Murder by Numbers demanded a bit too much of me. If it had leaned even further into the ridiculousness of the characters and world, I think I could have gotten on board with it, but the characters were just a little too real (read: older than like 15) for me to be like "okay, it makes sense that this person might make this bizarre leap of judgment based on the available evidence" or even "okay, I believe that this person would think it's a good idea to sneak into the murder scene through the air ducts to investigate when they're the prime suspect and not see how that would be even more suspicious". This happened almost every case and it was kind of infuriating.

On the whole, I think the game took itself too seriously for what it was. As a Picross game with a story, it was cute and well balanced between plot and puzzle, but either the characters and stories needed to be lighter to make it more acceptable how outlandish their decisions and drama were or they needed to tone down the goofiness to make that drama land better. As it was it just felt a bit dissonant.

Still fun tho! And I liked the character designs and general stories, so I'd still recommend it. I'm just kinda glad I didn't pay for it.

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Log Update #23

Short update as if it was the last day of 2023 so that after this I can post my year-end wrap-up and then start on 2024's journal!


This was just a simple free game that came up when I searched "giraffe" on Steam on a whim on one of the first days my brother visited for Christmas lol. It's kind of like a game of Snake except you can cross your neck. But you still have to puzzle through the right order to collect hats or else you might block off parts of the levels. It's a quick game but it was the perfect amount of silly for what I wanted.


I picked this up from the library as something I could play with my brother. It was... alright! I've played a handful of WarioWare games and I think I liked the others I've played more than this one, but it's not like it was bad. I thought it was clever to have a bunch of characters that played differently from each other and let any of them into a minigame to clear it, but some were just like... sooo much worse than others, it got kinda frustrating sometimes. But on the whole it was fun! Some minigames were better than others but that's just how it goes.

We unlocked every minigame and played each extra game mode at least once, but didn't bother playing after that.


I liked this but I have no idea how I had the patience for this series when I was younger. I save scummed the hell out of this to finish. Part of it is I got fed up with my whole inventory and storage being full for half the game with no way to manage it from the middle to the end, so I stopped exploring thoroughly at all (and also because I didn't want to get too overlevelled compared to my team hires?) and just ended up underlevelled and it made everything a struggle. Which is also a shame because all the new content in Sky (compared to Darkness, the version I played originally) is post-game... but I'm already so burnt out. :/

I did enjoy my time though. I took like a 3-week break at some point and that helped me not drop the game entirely the first time I started to get a bit burnt out. So maybe the few weeks I've been away as I write this will help! I really do want to see the new content!

I was an Eevee and my partner was Shinx. The two recruits I used throughout most of the game were Girafarig and Cherubi (now a Cherrim). I wish my full party was allowed to be around for more of the game but that's why I was looking forward to the post-game. (Even though now I'm realizing I think I may have a random coming with me and making me unable to bring helpers with me for the post-game dungeons... sigh!)


I've played a few games like this where you have to puzzle out word meanings, so I knew from just a bit of the demo that I'd be buying this and sure enough, I took the plunge the moment the winter sale started.

At first I was a little disappointed at how simple the game was. I like discerning meanings and the game doesn't give you any major hints as you encounter new words. It just lets you use a keyboard prompt to enter your own meaning. However, once you discover the context of a "set" of words, it scribbles in imagery in your journal for you to match words to and if you correctly match the words to the correct rendition, it verifies the word for you and locks it in as the game's own correct meaning. That was nice for some things (I had a lot of guesswork here and there) and it was satisfying to get the meanings right for more challenging concepts, but it was kind of disappointing when my silly meanings got overwritten really quickly.

Anyway, I thought because the game was confirming everything for you that it would maybe end up being too simple in the end. The other games I can compare this to are 7 Days to End With You and Heaven's Vault which also had similar "guess the meaning of a word and then test how it slots into every context to confirm" gameplay, but this one felt like sometimes it confirmed a bit too quickly. However! Where it shines is that you don't puzzle out just one language, you do it like 4 times! And then it becomes a combo of figuring out words and phrases that match listed translations from other languages and learning words exclusive to one culture. I reeeally enjoyed this because each language had its own little quirks and it was just tons of fun to figure them all out.

My only real complaint was that the final language was over so quickly. It didn't follow the format of the others where you go around talking to everyone and discovering every nook and cranny to get every bit of helpful context. The whole thing was basically deciphered via computer screens where you use the first four languages to match meanings, so you'd do a little puzzle and get like 10 words at a time. There's not that many glyphs/words per language so it just ended so quickly, which is a shame because the composition of its words were pretty fun! I would have vastly preferred learning the final language more slowly, or maybe have it be a much more advanced language with more compound glyphs.

In addition to the gameplay just being super fun, the visuals in this game were just gorgeous! The music was really pretty too. But the visuals pop so much and each tier of the tower you're in where you meet a different society and learn a new language are so different in visuals and audio. It really brings the game together so well. It was such a good game to largely finish out the year with!

Alas I did not take a single screenshot of my own (??? why) so above is just a screenshot from the devs lmao.


My brother and I were having each other play quick little games the week after Christmas and he had me play this one. I guess it's a Steam port of an old flash game that he couldn't believe I'd played. I thought I was getting into like some sort of math game for kids and couldn't really understand why he had me play it, but it did some neat things. It reminded me a lot of There is No Game which I talked about last update, where the game switches genres a lot. I didn't enjoy it quite as much though hahaha. I was glad it was short.


My brother told me to play this one out of his library so I did. I think he suggested it because I mentioned offhand that I like city-building games, but like... I am realizing I kind of don't all that much. I mean! I did prefer the city building parts of this game to basically all the rest of it, but I would not have picked this game to play on my own.

I'm glad I played it because for the most part it was fun! I'm just really bad at combat like this and didn't really find my stride at all until late game once I'd basically maxed everything out lol. (And then the final boss was so mean, not letting me do my usual "get super lucky with cards and upgrades so I'm super OP for the boss" soB... I ended up finally bumping the game down to easy and it wasn't satisfying at all but I was getting so frustrated on normal.)

Anyway, I decided to make a cult of pinkists so every single animal I found got changed to a shade of pink and everyone was very cute. I put a toooon of time into building out my cult. I think my brother's save file, which he'd never quite finished but was basically at the end of, was at 60 days at that point and when I passed 60 days I think I'd just barely finished the second battle area lol. The last thing I did before the final boss was actually toootally change up my farm area to be super efficient and also visually appealing. I'm into that stuff but it's stressful bc you always start out so janky and then sometimes you just get too lazy to fix it up later and then I never wanna look at my town because it's uggo. So these kinds of games are iffy but having a pink gimmick for the cult made it more fun overall.

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Log Update #24 - Year in Review 2023

As promised, here is my final update about 2023! I really loved my journal design this year and I'm still pretty heartbroken that the move to Xenforo messed it up so bad. I'm gonna be going back to something simple like my first journal theme for 2024 and beyond since PC is likely sticking with the stricter customization options. Wahh. Remember this year's cute journal as it was on vBulletin, not xF. ;_;


As usual, I stuck with both of PC's VG forum challenges and completed both!

Game Along Challenge
This one is always my favourite challenge. It's so fun getting a surprise theme to plan a game around.
I really liked the themes this year, although I was disappointed in my pick for the Halloween/horror theme. I just... don't play a lot of horror games and my October was also quite stressful so I didn't want to play anything actually anxiety-inducing. I still feel like my pick didn't really exemplify it well enough but if it comes up again in 2024, I'm gonna keep an RPG Maker game in my back pocket for it or something.

My favourite game I played because of the themes was probably Final Fantasy V. I really loved it! I want to play all the Final Fantasies and retro themes make them an easy choice. I think my favourite theme to match the prompt was probably the FFXV VR fishing game because it doesn't get more fishing than literally transporting you to the fishing hole and making you reel like your life depended on it.

On a whim this new year (2024 as I write this) I challenged myself to do only new games for this challenge because I felt like I was leaning too much on replaying old games I knew would match themes but now that I'm looking at them laid out, 9/12 games I played were new. (Not counting PMD because I didn't play any new content past the plot of Explorers of Darkness that I'd played before.) That's not so bad! I'm still gonna try to stick to my little challenge for 2024 but I'm pleased with most of my picks here.

Gaming Challenge
My initial goal for this year was 30 games, but when I blew past that number in July, I decided to bump that up to 50. It looked a bit dicey near the end but I ended up playing 54 games! (Well, 55 but my count in the Gaming Challenge is 54 so... uh? Maybe one doesn't count but at a glance I don't know which one.) A bunch of them were quite short but that's okay. I'm hoping next year I'll have a regular job and won't have as much time for gaming. @_@


The Good
The Outer Wilds
Okay so this is the best game I've ever played, hands down. I don't want to talk too much about it because I think it's best to go into without spoilers. (There's one part that's kinda scary but it's just one part of the game you likely won't go to until the end and I think that's the only content warning it needs.) This is just the most creative, well-designed game I've ever played. I can only live vicariously through the people I evangelize into playing it because I will never ever be able to experience it for the first time again. It's a game where you explore a galaxy and have to solve a mystery and the locales are all SO creative and exciting and I just cannot recommend this game enough. It set a new bar for amazing game design for me that I genuinely can't imagine anything ever matching because this one was already so perfect. (Also if you pick it up, power through the awkward flight controls, I promise it's worth it.) Please play it!!!!

Final Fantasy V
I was really surprised at how well this game held up given it came out in 1992. Maybe the GBA Version that I played has some QOL additions but the story, characters, and especially the battle/job system were all really good, even ignoring the era it came out in. It's definitely one of my faves! (Final Fantasy IX might have ended up in this section because I did REALLY enjoy it, but I don't think I'd have enjoyed it nearly as much if I hadn't been able to use cheats lol.)

Chants of Senaar
I talked about this like half an hour ago when I wrote my previous post so I won't go into it too much here, but I really love the genre of "figuring out/translating unknown languages" in games that I've been a bit spoilt by this year and last. I hope it continues and I hope they remain as flashy and gorgeous as this game was as they deliver me that gameplay

The Bad
Oxenfree II: Lost Signals
This was a game I had high hopes for because the first Oxenfree is just so, so good! But the sequel made me feel like they didn't understand why the first one was so good. It was because of the relationships you build or break between Alex and the people around her all night. This one... did not have that. There was no incentive to be nice to the random dude you went to high school with (rather than the New Stepbrother from the first game) and most of the interactions are with people you never even see so it just feels disconnected. I did not enjoy it. The plot was more wishy-washy than the first one too. I was just very disappointed in this.

This Way Madness Lies
I really wanted to love this. I like a lot of Zeboyd's games. They have a lot of fun humour and aren't afraid to lean into memes a bit and I honestly don't mind that in games. It makes them feel a bit like a time capsule of their era and usually the battle systems are creative enough that the games are also just plain fun. They use sort of an ATB system like FF where it's turn based but not strict about it. My complaint for this game was entirely with the battle system. It builds on Cosmic Star Heroine's which I also didn't really like and part of why I was so disappointed with this one is I'd just played one of their earlier games in December of 2021 before tackling this game in January 2022 so the way most of the characters felt useless in battle and the game tried to push you into using buffs/debuffs even though in almost every situation they didn't feel like the right move (as opposed to earlier games where they did feel worthwhile to use) just felt... bad. The setting and characters were so great (Shakespeare would have LOVED magical girls based on his plays) but the battles just fell so flat. :(

Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker Patches
I hated the patches. We got the bulk of them this year and the story just sucked. I hated almost every minute of them. I won't spoil since I think I've probably already ranted about this in patch updates in my journal but I'm just not a huge fan of where the game has gone during Endwalker. The content isn't really fulfilling for me, the story is so boring I don't even really care about doing it, and the gameplay content has been weird at best. The alliance raids were soooo boring to play and had deeply unsatisfying lore in the end. Island Sanctuary, the thing I'd been looking forward to the most, is such a boring grind. The variant dungeons and the weird difficulty levels on top of them are neat but the difficulties are confusing and the rewards aren't great. I really enjoyed the raid series and that's like... it. (And if I didn't have a casual static that has gone through the savage content very slowly, I'm not sure I'd even have fond memories of the raid stuff either.) I wish they hadn't tied the trials to MSQ since at least then I'd have one more option of story content to be interested in. (In SHB I hated the story in the trial series but at least it meant I had more options to like other parts of the patch content.) I'm not very excited for Dawntrail because they've done such a poor job of setting up hype for a new arc (in that they haven't done it at ALL in favour of a way-too-long rehash of Final Fantasy IV, completely ruining the more subtle references they did to it in Endwalker... which were already not subtle enough for my tastes). Sigh!



I don't really have any concrete plans for 2024 but here's a list of games I want to play, from the ones I'll absolutely play to the ones I'd just kinda like to get around to if I can:

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