[Game Journal] The upward spiral of videogames

[Janp]

Phew, what a month this was. I focused more on my work-related stuff and got into (probably not healthy) grindset this month. I was travelling for work and decided to use my time away from everyone and everything that coud serve as a distraction to write my dissertation project proposal. I think it's called that way in english. Basically, before I can conduct my dissertation research, I have to write 30 pages of theoretical background and research design and everything around it and then defend it i nfront of a commission. Which meant I barely had any time for gaming, but especially to write about it here in my journal. And I mean it. I beat Hyperbolica on the 2nd of February and finished Lies of P shortly after that. I even beat Pikmin 4 like a day or two after that, which I'll write about a short review now. It was really a hard month.

Pikmin 4
Pikmin was always a series I was interested in, but never just enough to actually try it. I remember I wanted to get it on 3DS, but there was only a spin-off, or at least that's what it looked like. When I got Switch, I considered Pikmin 3, but there were many games I wanted more. I was closely watching Pikmin 4, when it released and finally snapped to also get ti, when many people pick it as their GOTY of the last year.

And it was worth it. I like the main gameplay loop of using different kind of Pikmins and trying to find the optimal way to use them. It reminded me of the old Lemmings game for some reason. I was always motivated to explore the whole map just in case there is a new type of Pikmin that could help me with getting more treasures and to explore new areas. I don't know if this was case just of this game, but I found the timer for each expedition quite stressful. It felt like I'm wasting my time, when I'm waiting for my Pikmin to finish their work. And at least twice, I run out of time, when I had 99% completion rate on a map and had my Pikmin collecting the last treasure. So I had to waste whole next day just going back and picking the treasure few steps from my base.

I always loved the idea of microworlds. You know the world with its own rules, that is located in our real world. Think of Minuscule. Maybe that's why I also like programming that much. I adore the world of Pikmin. It was so cute and adorable. Each Pikmin had distinct design and personality. The story was fine. It was there to give you some motivation to do stuff, but it made sense for most parts.

What I didn't like was the post-game. Especially the final stretch of the game. I decided to continue and 100% the whole game, because I was having fun and felt like I want more. The story took a huge nosedive. I think the motivation to save your pup was great, but the execution was... pretty weird. There was some random guy just suddenly appearing and being the villain with no apparent reason. The game never bothered to explain, who is he. And then the final act of the game is one huge boring dungeon, where you only fight one boring re-used boss after another. The battle system itself was okay in small dosage, but this dungeon really overdid it. It completely ruined the game for me and I wish I never decided to do the post-game, because this gam would be perfect without it. But the sunk-cost fellacy kicked in and I just had to push through the dungeon to the end and beat the final boss, which was some random dog with barely any relevancy to the rest of the game.

Overall, I enjoyed the game, except for the finale. It had great gameplay loop and the world it build around you was expectional. I'll definitely try the rest of them, since they are all on Switch now. 8.5/10.

March will be same as February. I'll be mostly focusing on work. But I got the Persona bundle on Switch and started playing Persona 3 Portable, so I think I'll beat at least that. And I'll try to pick a game for Game-Along that can be beaten on Switch or using emulators on my phone or work notebook.

 

[Janp]

Okay, Persona 3 Portable is down. I'm ready for the next installment, but first, let's talk about this one.

Persona 3 Portable
Persona and Shin Megami Tensei are another two series I always had my eyes on. I played Shin Megami Tensei 3 remake in 2022 and also wanted to play the 5th one, but didn't get to it yet. And with the new version being released soon, I took a chance with Persona. There was nice offer for all three of them on the Switch, so I picked it up and decided to start with the first one... Well, third one actually. I expected similar experience with all the positives and negatives. And surprisingly, I got exactly that. Maybe a little bit better in some regards and worse in different regards.

Let's start with the positives. I adore the cast of characters the game presents to you. High school romcoms and teen drama are my guilty pleasure. I always enjoyed the sixth Harry Potter movie the most because of that. There is something charming about teens' banal, sometimes trivial, yet important problems they have to tackle on their way to adulthood. Persona kinda felt like a good Slice of Life anime in this regard. I also always preferred character-based stories, ao I was glad that Persona is all about them. Yes, there is some overarching story, but the true strength lies in the characters and their interactions. It was the main driving factor for me to finish the game until the end. I enjoyed deep diving into characters' personalities and slowly building a relationships with them. I think my favourite were Kenji and Yuko. Kenji especially. He had both over-the-top, yet relatable storyline about his love for someone he can never have.

One of the main parts of the game is the life sim. You play as a highschooler and have to go to the school. You have to balance your time wisely around your friends and social life and your academics success. I felt a little overwhelmed by it from time to time, because I felt like I'm falling behind. But I managed to level up all my stats few in-game months before the end. And this part of the game kinda lost its meaningless, because of that, since I couldn't get more rewards. I think if I could see how many activities I need to complete to max the stat, I could probably get more out of the game. But some interactions were locked behind maxxing these stats, so I think it's a good thing I did it this way. I even managed to finish all storylines, except one, which I failed to even start, because I had no idea how.

The second part of the game is all about battles. I like the battle system. It's the same battle system used in Shin Megami Tensei 3 remake, but a little bit more forgiving. There are several types of damage like piercing, ice, electric, light and so on, and each character can have a weakness or resistance (or even the immunity) against these types of damage. So far it's similar to Pokémon. But, if you manage to hit your enemy with super-effective attack (or critical hit), they will be knocked down and you can attack again. And if you manage to knock down all enemies, you can unleash a super powerful AoE attack. But the game has the very same problem as Shin Megami Tensei. Since exploiting weaknesses gives you a big adavantage, pretty much all bosses and mini-bosses have no weaknesses. So you have to slowly beat them out with regular attacks and it gets boring pretty quickly. I don't think I used different strategy on any of them, because of this. Just regular attacks, healing and dispelling debuffs. And most bosses were forgettable because of this. I can think of 2 maybe 3 bosses that had interesting bossfight.

And the battle system isn't the only problem I had with this portion of the game. You are introduced to Tartarus tower at the start of the game. It's a tower full of shadows, your primary enemies and you are told that you have to explore it. But the tower has no relevance to the story three entire game, until the very end. Yet, you are forced to slowly clear it. This was probably the worst part of the game. The tower was divided into several blocks, each with different style. But the floors were all randomly generated and the only difference between floor 20 and 50 was the number of the floor. Floors are made out of the combination of 4 rooms - huge rooms, huge room with stairs, huge room with exit and small hallway. There are occasionally either an enemy or a treasure, but neither of them was interesting. Each block had about 5 enemies that repeated over and over again (and blocks usually had just a recolour of the same enemies) and I don't think I ever found a better equipment in the chests that I already had equiped. If only there weren't that many floors to go through. But having to clear ~250 boring and empty floors was a chore and also a reason why I put the game down several times because I just wasn't feeling like wasting my time on this stupid tower.

Overall, I think the game highly overshoots the pure amount of floors in the tower you have to get through. If only they were somewhat differentiated, but they all have the same structure and are just pain to get through. Which is a shame, because the other half of the game is great and I was looking forward it. 7.5/10.

I plan on playing Persona 4 Golden and 5 Royal, because I heard they have better dungeons, while also keeping the life sim fun to engage with. But first, I'll play my Game-Along game - Untitled Goose Game. And I'm slowly playing Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales. The first game was fun, and this one is also fun so far, but I don't think I'll 100% it. I'll just go through the story.

 

[Janp]

Okay, it's almost the end of March, I think I should update this thread again. I was mostly traveling for work in March, so I only got some time to play. I managed to finish Marvel's Spider-man: Miles Morales, that I started in December. It was okay, but not that good as the original. I mainly played on my Switch and beat my Game-Along game for this month - Untitled Goose Game. It was fun. Nothing groundbreaking, but fun little game. And just few days ago, I also beat Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion in one sweep. It didn't click with me that much. Let's talk about them all...

Marvel's Spider-man: Miles Morales
As a sequel to the Marvel's Spider-man, I was looking forward to it, because I enjoyed the first game. This one is a little bit smaller, which is always a bonus.

To be honest, I'm not sure what to say about this game to not repeat myself. It has all the positives and negatives of the original, there isn't really anything new. Miles has some new moves, but that's it. It's a solid follow up, but it barely does anything new.

But there was something that I didn't like at all. You start the game fairly strong, so the game throws "strong" enemies your way. You face bullet-sponges and enemies tat can be hit only with one type of attack right from the start. Which is something I hated in the end game of the original. And here this problem is in all fights. And it's not like these enemies have better movesets to make the fight harder. They just have more HP or are immune to must pf your attacks. So the fights are longer and quickly gets boring.

I also wasn't that involved in the story, because I barely know anything about Miles Morales lore. I grew up with Peter Parker and was never interested in comics enough to read more than some of his stories. So the story didn't really have the same effect on me.

Overall, it was alright, but not as the original. 7/10.

Untitled Goose Game
Untitled Goose Game falls into a category of games I was interested in during their release, but not being able to play them for some reason, but then forgetting about them any time I could play them. Which is surprisingly huge list of games. But the Game-Along finally tipped me to play it.

It is an unique game, a "genre" I like. You play as a goose on a mission to wreck a havoc on a peaceful town. It's a puzzle game at a core, with a little bit of stealth thrown in there. You are given a to-do list of evil deeds and have to figure how to complete it. All while dodging the sight of the ones you want to bless with your genius.

It's pretty easy to get a grasp of controls and the laws of the game. The tasks are cryptic, yet fairly easy to decipher once you explore the given area. And I'm pretty sure there are multiple ways to tackle some of them. For example, there was a task to make someone buy one of their stuff back from a market. And I can think of at least 2 NPCs you can steal something from before that. I even think you could probably leave this task for later and make someone from late-game locations buy their stuff back. But what I didn't like was the fact that each location had the same kind of tasks. There was one kind, in which you were suppose to gather some things from the location to a special place. You're gathering food for a picnic in one location, various stuff from the market in another one, dishes and silverware for a romantic dinner in yet another location and so on. It got old pretty quickly, since most NPCs had the same pattern in their behaviour. There were some unique behaviours, for example a kid that is afraid of you, but most of NPCs just shoo you away or ignore you.

The game has a good idea and the novelty of the concept never wears off, since the game is just 2 hours long. And I think that's enough. I can't imagine it being any longer.

Overall, it was fun game, but didn't really leave the lasting impression. 7.5/10.

Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion
Yet another indie title that was on my radar for a long time. And it is finally time to check it out.

The premise of the game is simple. You play as a Turnip Boy, whose glasshouse got confiscated for not paying taxes. And to get it back, you start doing errands for the mayor.

I adore the world of this game. All characters have cute and clever designs based on fruits and vegetables. I was a little bit surprised by the depth the lore goes in, but it was a nice surprise. I didn't explore the world 100%, but I think I get most of the unsettling lore behind the living fruits and vegetables. I also enjoyed the humour of the game.

I think the game was lacking in the gameplay. The main loop is about going from a place A to a place B, getting an item there and going back to the place A. Which sometimes meant a lot of backtracking. For example, at one point, you have to go south from the central village, get an item there, then go north from the village to exchange this item for another one and then go back to south to finally continue the story.

There are puzzles, but I feel like they stay fairly simple the whole time. There wasn't really any depth in them. You usually do one unique puzzle at the start of the dungeon and then repeat this same puzzle the whole dungeon and it never gets more interesting than that first puzzle.

I would say the same about the combat. It's simple and it would be fine, but the game also has bunch of bossfights, which are pretty boring, since there is really just one strategy to beat them.

Overall, it was average experience. The world was fun and the humour landed perfectly. On the other hand, the gameplay was poor and repetitive. 6/10.

Next up is my first 2024 release - Dragon's Dogma 2. I also started playing Persona 4 Golden on Switch. Both of them are fine so far.

 

[Janp]

Phew, the time flies. The start of this month was crazy in uni. Students started hunting for their Bachelor's Thesis supervisors and I've been pretty popular choice. But we quickly run into a problem - I focus on research of teacher's attitudes and competencies towards using digital technologies (and informatics topics like programming) in schools, but the new dean doesn't like the idea of having research as the main focus of BTs. So after few days of fighting, I was able to get some research ideas greenlit and figure out different topics for the rest of the students. But wait, this is gaming journal... I also managed to play a little bit in all this stress. I got Dragon's Dogma 2, a brand new release of 2024. I think it's the first 2024 game I played this year. Good thing - it sets the the bar so low that I don't think I can find a worse game this year. Bad thing - well, actually the same. It took me majority of the month to beat it. So let's talk about this mess.
EDIT: When I started working on this thread, there was still about a half of April left. Now that I'm finishing it, there are only few hours of April left. Yeah, this month was fun...

Dragon's Dogma 2
Where to start with this game? I know about the original and was planning to play it one day. Some of my friends recommended it to me, since it reminded them of Gothic. But since the sequel got released, I decided to go with it instead.

The game starts strong. Like really strong. GOTY contender strong. It drops you in the world fairly quickly and first encounters with goblins and harpies are deadly. There is nice urgency in both the main and side quests. The game showcases that the world evolves around you, even when you don't interact with it. For example, there is a quest to save a guard lost in a woods, but you are put on hidden timer, because the guard fights monsters and you only have time until his HP is depleted. Picking up your first pawns is fun. Finding your first cave to explore is great.

But then... the game stops evolving around 4 hours in. You get stronger, but you still fight the same bunch of goblins and harpies, the story devolves into bunch of incoherent fetch quests, characters become non-existent, there is nothing to explore and you kinda stop to care about everything.

Let's start with the best part of the game - the battle system. The best way to describe it is that it feels like a lite version of MH battle system. At the start of the game, you only have one skill on your picked class and the fights feel hard, yet fair. It feels like every class is needed and you have to make a hard decision of which 4 classes to pick for yourself and your pawns. But as you level up and get better gear, you quickly find out that every class gets a way to deal with every enemy. For example, I started as Thief and struggled with flying enemies, since my pawn's class was Fighter. So I picked Mage and Sorcerer pawns to take care of flying enemies. But as I leveled up my Thief class, I quickly got skills to counter flying enemies. And my Fighter also got skills to bring flyers down. My Thief quickly became unstoppable one-man army. Many battles ended before my pawns could even react. Aside from regular enemies, there is also a bunch of big bosses. And once again, they are fun at first, but you quickly find one universal strategy to kill them all. Again, my Thief basically solo'd them all fairly early in the game.

And here comes the huge problem with the battle system. The lack of enemy variety. There are goblins, lizardmen, harpies, wolves, skeletons, zombies and souls for the regular enemies. And while yeah, there are different kind of goblins, like big goblins, red goblins, green goblins, they all act the same and the only difference is in their HP and power (and maybe their weakness, but the game becomes trivial so quickly that you can just spam regular attacks to kill everything). The same goes for every other enemy type. There are various types of lizardmen, lighting lizardmen, rock lizardmen, and some other that I don't remember, but all of them dies to the same strategy. And while it's cool to cut off their tail a first, you quickly realize that you can do it with every one of them and it becomes less special.

And it comes back to the same problem the game itself has. It's fun for the first few hours, when you're weak and you're discovering what can you do. For example, I managed to catch cyclops's foot with rope, when it puts it up, pull it and make it fall, but it's far from the optimal strategy of just spamming the same combo again and again until the enemy dies. Or I managed to use the rope to pull a harpie down from the sky and straight to the deadly water. When a dragon started flying away from me, I shot it down by breaking one of its wings. It can be fun, but sadly not for long. There is not as much depth to it like for example in MH.

One of the main gimmick of the game is switching classes, leveling them up and using some of their skills together. As I said, I started as a Thief, which was surprisingly an overpowered glass cannon class. This class gets to use a rope as one of its skills and it is overpowered. You can basically pull anything towards you, stun it on the ground and then deliver a OHKO. Combo this with a skill that makes you invincible and powerful AoE attacks and you just solved all encounters, even with bosses in seconds. When I started to get bored with it, I switched to Ranger, because one quest required it, and stayed as Ranger for a while, until I unlocked Mystic Spearhand, which is pretty good mobile class with bunch of broken skills. It can make your whole party invincible, basically making the whole battle system useless, because you can just cast this over and over again with no drawback and win every fight. And I had no reason to ever switch to another class. Since I automatically won every fight, there was no reason for me to change classes and get the passive bonuses from them. Not that they would bring any meaningful bonuses. Usually just few percent increase that's barely noticable.

The story is... well, there is a little bit of a story. And it makes no sense at all. You start with a simple goal of killing the dragon. Which is something the game immediately forgets and tries to introduce a political plot about getting support in the capital city of the human kingdom. Don't ask me for its name, it doesn't matter. You are then sent on a bunch of stealth missions (with no stealth mechanic in the game), after with the game drops this thread and introduces yet another plot, a fetch quest. And then, suddenly, there is the ending! The final location of the game looks kinda cool, but once again, you just have to do some fetch quests and then the game just ends. The dragon appears randomly at the end and you don't even get to fight it properly.

It's such a disappointing attempt at a story. And the characters don't save it at all. There is an evil queen, that is after you and already tried to kill you at the start of the story, and evil fake Arisen, but you interact with each of them maybe once per the whole story. They are barely characters in the world. You can find them and talk to them, but they will just say some generic stuff and nothing happens. You are supposed to be the public enemy number 1 and they compostela ignore you. And it's not like they don't recognize you, the story tries to make you believe that you have to do everything in secret. The character that tells you this will shout "Your majesty" at you on sight, then tell you to meet him somewhere less crowded, after which you have to meet him in the full inn. There is a force ghost character that helps you all the time, he even gives you the whole fetch quest at the end to get a divine weapon that can break the cycle of the world, but then it's randomly revealed that he is the main villain that doesn't want to break the cycle. And he also appears like 3 times in the whole story. There is a character that will help you in the catpeople kingdom, then help you again in one random sidequest, but then is randomly among the villains and you have to fight him. The game also makes him to be this fearsome warrior, yet the battle with him ended before he could even touch me. And the fake Arisen. You investigate his origin, then you never meet him until the endgame, where he's in the same band of villains the previous character is, you fight him and his fake pawns and he barely even says anything. You kill him and that's it. There is a catgirl on the cover of the game, which is a queen of catpeople. Pretty important charater, right? She has no relevance to the story at all. She appears in maybe two side quests and that's her whole part in the game. I think I could write pages about the nonsense of the story and characters.

Overall, this was one huge disappointment. Good start, but I feel like this game needed at least 2 more years of work to make it at least fun to play for more than 2 hours. 5.5/10.

And actually, before I even managed to write down my thoughts on Dragon's Dogma 2, I managed to beat more games. So let's talk about them.

TELETEXT
Okay, do you know what teletext is? It's quite an old technology used on the old TVs to display various pages of informations. And this game is a homage to this idea.

It's a simple Czech puzzle game with a scent of horror. I managed to finish it in about 40 minutes.

You take a role of someone, who is responsible for making the teletext work. You have to investigate the pages, find passwords and login informations to unlock new parts of the system and slowly piece together what is going on and why are you there. I don't want to spoil it, but it was nice story.

The main gameplay-loop is scrapping the page for something that would help you move forward. And I have to say that some puzzles are pretty hard and convoluted. I got stuck few times and had to use the hints that the game offers you. Sometimes, I was so close, yet to far from the solution. I think the game could telegraph what it wants you to do a little bit better. For example, you can let the game take you to the page you're suppose to do something with, but it usually just took me to a page that had the password on it, which I usually already knew, but I had no idea, where to put it. I also like how it plays with your computer. It makes it all more realistic.

Overall, the game's biggest strength is its setting and graphics. Puzzles are fun, but sometimes way too hard. 8.5/10.

The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo
This game is a charming old-school inspired P&C adventure. Well, maybe more of an interactive movie.

It reminds me of the old animated movies and shorts. You follow a character of Mr. Coo on his quest to open a mysterious gift. The world of Mr. Coo is dream-like, a magical ever-changing landscape that is fought upon by two eldritch deities, who can reshape the fabric of the universe itself, even change the flow of time. Or at least this is my interpretation of it, because the game has no dialogue or text that would help you understand what is going on. It employs the visual storytelling and it's up to you to make it all make sense.

It's fairly straightforward in its gameplay. The game switches between linear parts and puzzles and it the game only opens up a little bit at the very end. Which is a little disappointing, especially since the game ends kinda abruptly and on a cliffhanger. Even the whole "many pieces" bit is there for the very end of the game. Not that the game is long, it took me about an hour to finish it, but I can't imagine how much work it had to take to animate all of this.

Overall, I think this is really showcase of the animators, a little bit less of a game tho. 8/10.

Persona 4 Golden
Phew, where do I start with this one? Coming from the third entry, I thought what I was getting into. But it just completely broke any expectations I had for it. In a good way.

The game works pretty much the same as the P3P, but is better in every regard. It's like they took my critic of the P3P and made a game specifically for me.

Let's start with the battle system. I hated how mind-numbingly boring, long and unnecessary the grinding was. Like completing ~50 identical floors per boss was just such a weird design choice. Thankfully, P4G solves this quite effectively. Now the dungeons have unique designs and only have around 10 floors. There are puzzles and gimmicks in dungeons. They all feel so fun to get throught. On top of that, dungeons are now actual part of the story. It's such a weird thing to say, but P3P dungeons were just so disconnected from the rest of the game. There is also fewer of them and I think that's just enough. There is a small change following this. Now, you don't have much options on how to restore your SP, so taking down enemies effectively is more important. That meant that items were more important, because healing using skills could cost you a good amount of SP. I like this change, but it sometimes meant I just hit auto-battle and let the game beat the encounter using only regular attacks. Which is a shame.

As I mentioned before, the dungeons are now closely tied to characters. And I quite enjoy the cast of P4G. I think I also like the main cast more than P3P cast. Especially since you could start their Social Links right from the start of the game. And progressing the SL also gave them new skills and power-ups, even new Persona evolutions. I really enjoyed this change.

On the other hand, I didn't really care for the side characters that much. For some at least. I didn't really care for the two women adults - the stepmother and the nurse, and for some students, which I don't even remember their name. The one that skipped classes and the brother of the second murder victim. On the other hand, I like the sport bros.

Aside from better Social Links, I like activities you can do. Work opportunities have bigger depth, including their own Social Links, you really feel like you're getting better and unlocking new opportunities all the time. But it also gives you new ways to optimize your time around them. Especially since now you have to spend a whole day going to the dungeons and out, not just a night like in P3P.

I also can't stress how much I love the settings and the atmosphere of the game. It gives me slice of life anime feeling. It kinda reminds me of Kokoro Connect. The main mystery was delivered perfectly. It always kept me on my toes. And the ending also sticked the landing. I'm a little disappointed that it turned into "save the world" trope, but up until that point, it was great detective story.

Overall, this was awesome sequel that answered all my criticism of P3P. I can't wait to play the next one. 9/10.


So, that was pretty interesting month. I'm glad I found a fine for shorter indie gems alongside long AAA production. For the next month, I plan on playing yet another 2024 release - Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden. I started it and it looks like a well done action adventure game. Nothing mind-blowing, but it looks like it could be fun for few hours. I also plan on playing the last Persona game, Persona 5 Royal. But I'll probably first throw in some shorter indie title, for example DARQ or Don't touch this painting.

 

[Janp]

Wow, it's already the end of May. And I played the total of like 5 hours this month. Taking care of my newborn son had a bigger priority. I managed to finish like 2 side quests in Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, which I'm actually enjoying more and more I play it. But I also had almost 3 weeks of pause in between my playthroughts, so it's maybe just the result of me on gaming much. I also started Persona 5 Royal and... it didn't left a good first impression. It's so forcefully edgy. Really a difference from the P4G. Now for the games I actually finished. I beat Donkey Kong on Switch. It was cool trip down the gaming history. I also beat Please, touch the artwork, a puzzle game with intresting premise, but I have a little bit of mixed feelings about it.


Donkey Kong

A classic. That I only ever played for few minutes and never got through the first level. Actually, I had no idea there was more than one level.


Finishing it in one go was harder than I expected, but the game overall was pretty easy. But that's maybe because I didn't care about my score. The final level caught me off-guard, because I got to the top and suddenly realised I can't reach the princess. It took me a while to figure it out and quite a lot tries to do it perfectly without dying.


To be completely honest, the game was so short that I don't even know what to talk about. I don't see a point in talking about graphics or soundtrack. Nor gameplay, since it was really trivial, yet fun.


Overall, this was a really cool experience that didn't take that long to finish. I can only imagine how awesome it would be to play this in actual arcade. I'm not even sure how to rate it.


Please, touch the artwork

Please, touch the artwork is a simple indie puzzle game about art. You are taken on a journey through 3 imaginary galleries (but there are also real-life paintings presented as rewards for completing each gallery), each one telling you an unique story.

It was kinda a hit and miss with the gameplay in each gallery. I really like the one where you navigate a square to its lover. It has fine mechanics and interesting story. I also enjoyed the one with mazes. It had really simple mazes, but it felt relaxing solving them. I wasn't really that into the last gallery. It had interesting premise, but I got bored of it after 5 solved puzzles and it never grabbed me again. Even the story was meh.

Overall, this was fine game. Not really something I'll remember or return to, but it was good way to kill some time. 6/10.

 

[Janp]

Being a father and playing games is hard to combine. I found out that the best way to game is in short bursts right now, since the newborn needs a lot of attention. Like 5 to 10 minutes at a time, when I don't have anything else to do, but still have to be available to help. And so, I started going through Switch's NES, SNES and GB libraries. And so, I played through the old Mario platformers - Super Mario Land 1 and 2. Let's talk about them.

Super Mario Land 1
While Mario platformers are quite popular, I never really played that many of them. To be honest, I can't even recall how many there are and how many I have played. Mostly because the confusing naming schemes. I remember playing the original and then playing the one focused on getting coins on 3DS. I'm also slowly getting through the older one on Switch, but that was originally released on Wii or Wii U. And I also played one on the original DS.

(Modern) Mario 2D platformers really felt all the same, sanitised and made using the same base. That's why I can't even say what level is from which game or even what was the name of each game. New Ultra Super Mario Bros. Deluxe something...

Super Mario Land felt different. Like someone tried to make a copy of a Mario platformer without making it too obvious. There is a character that could, but also doesn't have to be, Mario. It looks similar, but because of the minimalistic design of the game, it isn't quite Mario. The same can be said about design of the levels. Right from the start, you're dropped in a different kingdom, which looks eerily similar to some parts Mushroom Kingdom, including some enemies.

The game was quite straightforward and easy. Each level took me few minutes to beat and there were only few instances in which I felt like the platforming section was hard.

But, I feel like Mario's movement was a little bit weird. For some reason, he just straight up felt down the corner of the ledge, despite Mario seemingly standing on it with enough room to move. Not only that, but a hitboxes of some enemies also felt a little bit off. Like I jumped right on them, but went right through them and died. And since there was nothing ton collect aside from coins, I usually just speedrun through each level the fastest and avoided the most enemies.

Overall, it was unique Mario game and I can imagine the impact it had as a launch title for Game Boy. It's fun for a while, but I don't really see any big reason to play nowadays aside from being interested in Mario history. 6/10.

Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins
Okay, now this was a wild ride. At least story-wise. Mario has a private island now? With a huge Mario statue. And he (presumably) bullied Wario? Now that's something!

Sadly, it's pretty much the same as the first game. I appreciate the unprecedented design of the zones. Now it feels like even bigger knock-off. And I'm not sure if it's a bad thing. This game really feels unique when compared to modern Mario titles. I mean, there are Gradius-like levels in the game. Why aren't they a thing anymore in modern Mario?

Otherwise, it's almost the same as the first game. Fine, but really a relic of time at this point. Most levels can be skipped just by using the totally-not-a-flying cap, which is a really weird oversight in my opinion. Like why even try to beat the level, when you can just fly over it?

Overall, this game have a bigger personality as the previous game and I like it. It was short and easy, but the design themes of some zones are really cool and the final battle with Wario is fun. But aside from that, there isn't really much to say to pick this game instead of more modernish Mario platformers. Or Mario platformers from this era, but released on other systems. 6.5/10.

I'm about to finish Banishers soon. I saved literally before the doors leading to the final boss. I think I can beat it this month.

 

[Janp]

I'm back sooner than I thought. I found some free time and finally finished Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden. I like Don't Nod's action games, despite them usually having some weird elements in them, which hold them back from being great. And Banishers are such a game.

Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden
Banishers is an action adventure game about a duo of titular banishers - warriors that banish ghosts stuck in the world. You play as Antea, a master banisher and her apprentice Red. They are sent to the newly discovered continent of America in 1695 to solve a particularly nasty case of haunting. The whole town of New Eden is haunted by a ghost known as Nightmare. And the Nightmare proves to be an obstacle for the duo, as she kills Antea. She becomes a ghost and if she wishes to rest in piece, she, together with Red, have to find a way to beat Nightmare.

I really like the dynamic between the two. Antea is more , while Red is more on the kind side. But they both have a hard time coming to terms with Antea becoming a ghost. I quite enjoyed their attempts to get the most out of the situation and to spend the last few days together.

What I didn't like that much about the game is the battle system. It's a solid action adventure system with Souls-like mechanics at a side - you have limited healing that restores by resting and each enems has a set moveset. Since you play as two characters, between which you can easily and quickly switch, there is a room to experiment and find your own strategy. Red uses a sword and a rifle, while Antea has quite a few supernatural tricks up in her sleeves. There is quite complex skill tree, in which you have to always pick one of two options, but can easily change your choice. In the end, I was happy with my build. My strategy was following: Quickly teleport to a group of enemies as Antea, wreck havoc, which boosts Red's rifle's damage by 300%, then, when everything is on cooldown, get back and shoot everything down with Red. This also boosts Red's other attacks and even his defense, so when someone got to close, I easily beat them. It was fun build and I think it also helped me appreciate the battle system a little bit more.

On the other hand, the thing that made no sense to me and I hate it in almost every game the tries it, is level-scaling enemies. There are about 5 different types of enemies, but they all scale with your level. Which sometimes lead to weird situations like the most basic enemies taking 3 hits to kill at the start of the game, but takes several more hits to kill in the endgame. And it also makes the game quite repetitive, because you quickly learn their unchanging movesets. Bosses are fun on the other hand. I enjoy all of them both from the gameplay, but also visual side of things. Especially the Nightmare had fun moveset.

The story is divided in several episodes, in which Red and Antea helps the people of New Eden and tries to figure out what is Nightmare and how to beat her. Each episode has one central mystery and bunch of side quests, each one with a mystery and ghost haunting revolving around specific NPC. And these were good. I'm impressed by the sheer amount of different variations of "I'm haunted by a ghost" stories. My favourite must be a guy, who wants to revive his wife, but instead brings back his brother, who had an affair with his wife. His brother then possess his body and revive the wife, but also brings her spirit into the same body. So now there are three spirits fighting over a control of one body. Sometimes, demons get involved in the haunting and it's so much fun uncovering each mystery.

Lastly, I feel like I have to mention yet another thing that I didn't like, well... One that I actually actively hated. There is a poor attempt at completing modern AAA open-world check-list. There is a parody of an open-world with all the exciting activities and treasures to find! Like fight regular enemies in an arena! Or fight regular enemies with boss-like health bars in an arena! Or fight bosses again in an arena! Or if you want to explore and find treasures, you can find chests, or chests locked with one key, or chests locked with two keys. Or, if you're really hungry for exploration, you can also find chests locked with 3 keys! I feel like the game would be so much better without these things kinda forced inside.

Overall, it was fun game, a lot better than I expected. But it's held back by some questionable mechanics. 8/10.

 

[Janp]

Okay, just a quick update about a challenge I'm participating in. I won't really count this challenge towards the total of my played games, but I still want to include it in my journal.

Gothic tri-OLOG - attempts 1, 2 and 3
Earlier this year, me and some of my friends decided to challenge ourselves to a Gothic tri-OLOG challenge. If you've been following my thread, you probably noticed that I like to do challenge runs in Gothic series, so of course I had to join in on the fun. But what is tri-OLOG? OLOG stands for "one life, one game", meaning whenever a player dies, they have to restart the whole game. Tri-OLOG takes it even further and challenges the player to play the whole trilogy without dying. That means you start with Gothic 1, then move on to the second one, and finally to the third one, but if you die in any of them, you have to start back from Gothic 1. And since I'm a Gothic veteran player, I also decided to include some more restrictions, like not using Scar's sword or not stealing from some locations.

On my first attempt, I quickly got to the Old Camp and finished some quests at this location. I got a few levels and invested them in STR to increase my damage. I let Mordrag take me to the New Camp, did some quests there, learned to use one-handed weapons better, went to the Old Mine, and started cleaning weak monsters between the Old Mine and the Old Camp. Then I had a "great" idea. Let's clear Nek's cave. While having not even a half of HP. And I got jumped by a pack of molerats and died.

The second attempt was a lot better. I did everything the same way, but I spent some time going back to Diego or Lares to increase my STR more often. Pretty much every level. That way, I was able to clear Nek's cave and even get to the Sect Camp. I did some quests there and returned to Old Camp for one quest, while probably wandering into one hut and getting oneshotted by a guard instantly.

In my third attempt, I avoided all huts with almost divine respect. I did everything described above and also got some basic armor. I started clearing the whole map, risking quite a lot sometimes. I managed to beat lizards, bloodflies, chasers, and even biters. I got about 60 STR and master one-handed weapons and starter hunting orcs. It was a long hunt. I had to bait only one at the time, but I managed to clear almost the whole orc territory. I could also clear their city, but I wasn't patient enough. I also beat a shadowbeats, which was a stupid risk for almost no reward, and beat all three golems in front of Xardas Tower. It elevated me to the 10th level, so I could join Mercenaries. Which, in turn, meant I could hunt razors and skeletons with less risk. I also got to learn two-handed weapon fighting earlier. The rest of the game was easy at that point. Actually, the final battle with Sleeper gave me the run for my money, especially his followers, because there are like 20 overpowered novices attacking you at once. But I made it and beat the first part of my Gothic tri-OLOG. Next up, I'll play Gothic 2 with addon, which will be a true test of my skills. I can't wait to die on the very first goblin I meet 5 minutes into the game.

Aside from that, I'm also playing Solasta: Crown of the Magister. It's a fun D&D game, but there is a lot of junk keeping it in the slightly above-average category. I think I'm almost done with the main campain, but I'll also play all DLC campaigns.

 

[Janp]

Okay, it's almost the end of the month. Let's talk some games again.

Solasta: Crown of the Magister
Solasta is a rare kind of game. The kind of game I had a lot of fun playing, but I feel like it's severely flawed and I don't think it's a great game at the core. It's a game that pulled one aspect perfectly and completely botched the rest. To the point that I had to install (un)official patch to properly play the game.

Where to start with my thoughts? Let's start with the best aspect of the game - the battle system. Because Solasta has one of the best implementation of D&D rules I can think of. It's almost 1:1 conversion and I loved every battle and even at the end, I felt like I need more. I might buy DLCs, which apparently have new campaigns, in the future. While Baldur's Gate 3 changes some stuff to make the whole experience more streamlined and faster, Solasta throws all the tabletop stuff at you. You have to plan ahaed and prepare spells on rest, you have tu attune to some magical items, there are hit dice on short rest, and so on. And it works so well. It requires the player to think ahead and be prepared for everything.

On the other hand, the game's audiovisuals side is laughably bad. The graphics and eapecially NPCs looks like the failed attempt at Oblivion. They look like they were made out of clay, the hair and beards were badly sticked to them using glue and the voice acting is all over the place. Some characters yell their calm lines, others almost whisper, when they are suppose to shout and so on. It's clear that this wasn't the strong suite of the devs. But I get it, this is indie game and I can imagine devs not having enough capital or experience to do it better. And as I said, I never found this to be overwhelmingly negative thing. It usually made me chuckle a little bit instead.

The story also falls into this category. It was all over the place. Especially the pacing. One moment, you're tasked with investigating, who is a spy in a fort you just arrived in. It's played as super huge important task. And not even 2 seconds later, the whole fort is under attack and the spy business is never brought up again. The whole story is just an excuse to get your party to more fights. And it doesn't help that there is literally 0 RP involved. You create a party, but that's it. You can sometimes pick a dialogue option, but you usually have to pick all of them anyway. There are barely any checks to pass in dialogues. Or anywhere else. On the other hand, I quite enjoyed the puzzles in each area. There was just enough to explore in each area and solving puzzles was rewarding.

As for my party, I made all 4 characters. My idea was to use classea I don't usually use. From the available list, I used the party consisting of Bard, Druid, Ranger and Warlock. My bard was the main character and party face. I used College of Life, which had a nice bonuses on using Transmutation and Necromancy spells. I mainly used it with Longstrider, but I also experimented with Heat Metal and Blight. This subclass also grant my bard the ability to cast Fly on herself and other party members. Later on, I used her for crowd control and to buff my party, because her damage was awful. My druid character was Forest Guardian, meaning he was focused on melee fighting. Later on, I also used his summoning spells. I never used Wild Shape. My ranger character was the main damage dealer. I picked melee focused class and she completely decimated most enemies. She was the main target for my buffs and she dominated in both melee and ranged fighting. And finally, I also had a warlock, whose only use was Eldritch Blast. I think this one was hurt the most by the lack of RP elements, because Warlock's battle plan isn't really deep.

And finally, there is a huge problem - the game isn't finished and doesn't work. Not without an unofficial patch that makes the game playable. I can't imagine playing the whole game without the patch.

Overall, I think this game's battle system is one of my favourites in this genre. Sadly, the rest of the game is not on par with it. But despite all the negative comments about the story, dialogues and characters I said here, I still feel like it's still not as bad as Dragon's Dogma 2. 6/10.

Soul Blade
Back on the Christmas 2001 or 2002 (I'm not sure myself), I got the gift I would never imagine getting - a brand new PS1. And alongside it, I also got two games. One was Spyro 3 and the other one was a double pack of Tekken 2 and Soul Blade. I remember trying all of them the same night.

I returned to Soul Blade after more than 20 years. I barely remembered it. But the moment the intro started playing, all of my childhood memories returned. I was just sitting down, enjoying the intro over and over again. And this time, I can actually undnerstand English, so it's on the whole another level.

There isn't much to do in the game. I first started the Arcade mode, mostly to remind myself of the characters and their movesets. I accidentally picked Rock while looking at the roster, so I started playing as him. Rock is a huge barbarian with a huge axe. I wonder where my love for barbarians with huge weapons come from... At first, I could barely pull out a single combo, but by the time I got to Voldo and Cervantes, I could handle myself good. It took me 20 years to realize that you fight all other available characters in Arcade. I also never realized each character has one good and one bad ending, depending on some player input in the ending cutscene. I always thought only Siegfried got two endings, since one of his endings unlocks a secret character.

After that, I did some timed and survival challenges playing as Voldo and Siegfried respectively. These were pretty straightforward, you just had to beat all opponents in set time or beat as many opponents on one life.

And finally, there is a "story" mode, in which you follow up your picked character. There are special rules in each round, like fighting more opponents at once, or having special weapons at your disposal. I once again played as Rock and used a huge boulder weapon that had better damage, but was also slowly killing me.

There isn't really much to say otherwise. I don't play fighting games, so I can't say if this is a good fighting game. You can do some sick combos and kick some ass.

Overall, I had fun with the game. Fine visuals, fun gameplay and nice nostalgic journey. 7.5/10.

I also finished Chants of Shanaar, but I'll leave that one for another post.

 

[Janp]

Okay, I made it on time. The last game I've played in July - Chants of Shanaar.

Chants of Shanaar
Chants of Shanaar is a game, in which you don't understand anyone. You don't understand your goal. You have no idea about the world about you. At least at the start.

The main gimmick of the game is learning new fictional languages. There are 4 in total, each with its own rules. For example, each language has different rules on how to form a sentence, or how to indicate plural or negation. As you explore the world, you learn new words and can guess what they mean in your dictionary. After some time, you unlock a special dictionary pages, in which you have to link a word to a picture and if you link them right, you unlock the proper meaning of the given word. I think this is nice way to get some confirmation for your guesses, but in my opinion some pictures are not a really good representation of the given word.

Each area feels distinct enough, I enjoy the aesthetics of all of them and I love exploring them. I wasn't a fan of stealth sections in the second area tho. And the sewers maze in area three also gave me a headache. I think my favourite location was the alchemists area. The cold logic and order was feeling everywhere in this area.

I apparently got a true ending, but I can't say I was aiming at it. Actually, I had no idea the game had more endings until searching about it online. This ending felt natural to get. And to be honest, the villain of the story felt tucked on and had barely anything to do with the rest of the game. I think I'll have to dig a little bit online to find out what was his deal, because I'm completely lost.

Overall, this was a fascinating game. The languages were fun to decipher and learn. 9/10.

In the second half of July, I felt like playing more CRPGs and started Honour Mode run in Baldur's Gate 3. I'm using Wyll as my main character and plan on using him as fire-based Sorcerer/Warlock with party of similarly fire-based characters like Light domain Cleric Shadowheart. That will be my main focus in August. I'm already almost done with Act 1. I just killed Minthara and I'm one more leader from taking down Goblin Camp.

 

[Janp]

Okay, I beat Infinifactory, one of the hardest puzzle game I ever played.

Infinifactory
This game broke me.

I'm well aware how hard the Zachtronics games are, but this one was hardcore. But this one... This one takes a cake. Maybe it's because it's in 3D, while other gsmes usually takes place in 2D? I don't know...

I already tried it back in 2016, but put it down after few levels. When I booted it up this time, I found myself exactly where I left the game. In the middle of my solution to the problem. And I had no idea what is going on. So I had to go back and start over. Which was hard, since I couldn't return to the tutorial. Not that there was much of a tutorial. After relearning the basics and made some progress, I quickly got stuck few puzzles later...

And I loved it! It really challenged me in a way not many games managed to do. As a true computer scientist, I was drawing up solutions on paper, created several (automatic) contraptions, described them using equations and used this all to solve most puzzles in this game. I spent countless nights trying to figure out an optimal solution for the current puzzle.

On the other hand, the controls felt junky and I sometimes accidentally destroyed my solution by clicking wrong button. Or right button in the wrong moment. And it wasn't fun, because I usually had to start all over again. And the fastforward fuction also sometimes felt too slow.

Overall, it's unreal how this game absorbed me and how much I had to try to beat some puzzles. 8.5/10.

 

[Janp]

September is over and I barely finished my Game-Along game and I'm only writing about it now, about 4 hours from the end on September. And I'm posting this in October. But there is this September somewhere on the planet, so that counts. Fatherhood is taxing... But I'm so close to beat both Baldur's Gate 3 and Persona 5 Royal. All that is missing in BG3 are 2 fights (Raphael and the final boss) and I'm in the last month of P5R. But let's talk about Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls.


Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls
These thoughts are years in making. I started playing the game two years ago, but only finished the first Final Fantasy. I started the second one, but wasn't feeling the battle system, so I dropped it and only returned to it now.

I enjoy the first game. It was simple in most regards, but fun. It's a traditional "heroes save the world" tale. Nothing more, nothing less. And it was nice change of pace from the huge and (sometimes wanna-be) complex stories of RPG I've played lately. The battle system was great (who would have thought so, with original FF1 being a trendsetter in JRPG genre). I grinded up a little bit at the start, because monsters felt way too strong, but had no need for grinding after that. Overall, it was really fun little adventure.

I should also note that I beat FF1 twice. Once years ago and now again for Game-Along.

The second one on the other hand... Right from the start, the battle system didn't click with me at all. I usually like this skill-based leveling, but leveling some of the stats felt weird. Luckily, the game was fairly easy, so I didn't have to bother with leveling that much. The story on the other hand was fun. Nothing groundbreaking, but I enjoyed it. I also like the system of remembering words and using them later. There are so many fun snd brutal interactions with this.

Overall, I had fun with both games, but I think the second one is really putting the whole collection down. 7/10.

 

[Janp]

5 months! I've been playing these 2 games for 5 months! I am finally free!

Persona 5 Royal
Finally! This game took be a better part of the year to finish. Was it worthy?

I knew this game is yet another JRPG that takes way too long to get interesting beforehands, but I wasn't expecting the beginning to be THAT bad. And even then, after about 30 hours, it got a little bit better, but it was still kinda boring. I understand the themes the story tries to incorporate in the story and characters, but in the end, it fizzles out to all teenager characters having a "I'm so cool, edgy and mysterious and no one understands me" personality, while all adults characters are evil for the sake of being evil and they hate all teenagers. There are barely any characters that don't fit these two roles for most of the game. And because of that, the characters ended up being uninteresting and blend together.

I also didn't find the story captivating or fun to follow. Which is really an achievement from the game's side, because I love the idea of phantom thieves. Kaito Kid is one of my favourite characters from Detective Conan. But I couldn't find myself caring for anything that happened during this game. Especially the first half of the game. While the first palace is cool, it really tries hard to build the "teens good, adults bad" and anti-establishment narrative with nothing else around it. And once you resolve it, the initial set of characters just have no other motivation to do phantom thieves stuff anymore. Which leads to a slog that is the second palace and all the filler around it. And the story lost me for good after the flashback part is over. The story completely resigns on any inner coherence and characters and environment bends to the will of writers in the name of subverting expectations. For example, characters can suddenly freely enter police interrogation room and be there unmonitored, can somehow create cognitive clones of other people and control them and can predict the future. It felt like the story is trying to emulate and hit the same story beats of the previous entry, but it really all fall flat.

And for some reasons, the game just love to talk. Talk and talk. Repeating the same thing over and over again. Spelling everything about the story and characters out and making sure you remember it. And then it repeats it even more. It buries any resemblance of interest in the story under tons of boring and unimportant dialogues. I think if the game cut 95% of dialogues, nothing would be lost. The player would still get all the information, character development and moments, every story beat, everything. And it would have so much better pacing. Speaking of pacing, one funny thing I noticed is that after saving the world and getting quite a sad ending, the game gives you an opportunity to go on dates. And that's the final thing you'll do in the game.

But let's also talk about the positive things. I love the battle system and it grabbed my attention enough to not drop the game. It's closer to the SMT system, especially in monster department. Shadows are finally demons/personas and are fully recruitable. I'm glad they dropped the shadows from previous entries, because they had lazy design and got old pretty quickly. Now, every dungeon has a new set of enemies and it's actually fun to fight them. It's also nice to not have to deal with Shuffle time anymore.

Fusing was changed a little bit. I absolutely loathe the lore reason they gave to fusions. But it goes in the same edgy vein as the rest of the game. But I like itematization of Personas. It's similar to the system in P3, but a lot better. I had fun experimenting with various Personas and their items.

Palaces are incredible. I love that they are no longer randomly generated. This allows them to actually have secrets to uncover. And they are not limited to like 3 types of rooms. They also fit really well to their respective characters. And the main bosses also brings a lot of personality to the table. Both in the design and gameplay department. Yeah, some mechanics repeat from previous titles, but it was still fun. And they were tied to the themes of given palace and its ruler.

Social links, or whatever are they called now, are again a step in a right direction. I'm glad that every single one of them now has a gameplay purpose like getting some nice buffs or more items to purchase. I enjoy some of the interactions, but they were for sure the weakest of the modern Persona games. On the other hand, now I fully understand why this game is favourite amongst a certain subsection of fans. There is a Social link with your headteacher, during which she is dressed as a maid and calls you "master". And she can give you "special massage" after the heist.

Overall, if any resemblance of a good story or character wasn't buried under tons of boring and uninteresting dialogue or coated in the most iam14andthisisverydeep edginess, then this would be really fun game. But like this, it really falls behind the rest of the series. 7/10.

Baldur's Gate 3 - Honour mode run
I already talked about Baldur's Gate 3 earlier this year. Strong contender for my GOTY. It's so good I had to play it again after few months (technically days, because I started the run in February, but only played it for about an hour back then because of my travels).

Honour mode is the hardcore mode of the game. If your party wipes, you have to start over. You can't reload or save scum. All enemies have better stats and some even have new legendary actions.

My strategy was to quickly dispatch any enemy in the way. My main character was Wyll, because I wanted to see more of his interactions with Mizora. I started as Warlock, but slowly became Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer 11/Fiend Warlock 1. I used Fire Acuity hat to get crazy boost to spell attack and spell save DC and then blasted everything with Fireballs or controlled enemies with Command. I also used and romanced Shadowheart as Light Cleric 6/Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer 6 for healing, support and more Fireballs. Then I had Gale as Divination Wizard. I gave him most spell save DC items and used him for crowd control. And I used Lae'zel as Champion Fighter with all the crit items to finish everyone, who survived my Fireballs. I'm the end, she had over 50% chance to crit.

The run was pretty smooth, I managed to beat it on my first try. There were few moments of doubts, like while fighting harpies or Myrkul, but overall, it wasn't as hard as I was expecting.


And now, let's play some indie games...

 

[Janp]

Wow, I actually finished a game for once. It's such a weird feeling not to spend 80 hours in it. I'm finally getting through my backlog that I accumulated over the last 5 months. First one on the list is The Suicide of Rachel Foster. So let's talk about it!

The Suicide of Rachel Foster
This is the walking sim from few years ago. I was interested in it during release, but had other games to play. It was on sale on Switch, so I finally grabbed it.

The game follows character of Nicole as she returns to her family's abandoned hotel to sell it after her father's death. Nicole's family was broken up by her father's affair with titular Rachel and her impeding death. But as she quickly realize, there is more than meets the eye.

I love the atmosphere of the hotel. It keeps the uneasy ad mysterious tone the whole time. It masterfully keeps the feeling of not being alone in the hotel and keeps you on your toes. And yet, this is not a horror game, it's still just a walking sim. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the hotel is strongly inspired by the hotel from The Shining.

I also enjoy exploring the hotel. The hotel is small, but since navigating it is hard, it can feel like a huge unwelcoming place. There are no quest marks, so you have to navigate the hotel on your own. You also don't see your position on the map you carry with you, which also adds to the overall feeling of being lost. And there are also secret passages not shown on the map. These were always fun to explore.

The story of the game is problematic a little bit. While I was hooked up on the mystery of what really happened to Rachel, the final twist and reveal kinda fell flat. More I think about it, the less sense the rest of the game makes. And the fact that the game tries to paint the relationship between Nicole's father and 16 years old Rachel, who he got pregnant, as something romantic doesn't really resonates with me well.

I was surprised how well the game runs and looks on Switch handheld mode. But I think the game map could have been made more readable on the small display. But I wasn't fan of the need to stand perfectly pixel perfect to interact with some items. It made me stuck on multiple occasions, because I couldn't find the right spot to interact with the item.

Overall, the game has a great premise and the location and atmosphere are top-notch. But it boils down to paedophilia apology and it just kills the whole game. 5/10.

 

[Janp]

One way to tackle the ever-growing backlog of games is to play games I already bought. The second way is to prevent games from getting on the backlog in the first place. That's right, it's time for the new release - Neva.

Neva
Neva is the game from the creators of GRIS and it really shows. I already talked about GRIS in this thread some time ago and liked it a lot. So I was looking forward this game.

Neva, just like GRIS, has an exceptional audiovisuals. It focuses on enviromental storytelling, using no dialogue at all. I love the levels' design. They are themed after seasons and each one of them is exceptional. The game starts in summer, with the main character and her wolfs enjoying their time in the forest, until everything goes down. The forest is attacked by a force referred to as Decay and is slowly transforming into a unnatural, I could even say eldritch, version of itself. Trees are floating, the dead animals rise back to life, the world itself is fractured and recreated into a void. And as you move through fall and winter, you can clearly see the effect of these seasons on the dying forest.

It was fun to scale the world. I was surprised by some of the hardest and more complex platforming challenges. Some required precious timing and I plummeted to my demise a lot more that I expected to. There are timed sequences, in which you have to escape the crumbling world and it sometimes required almost pixel perfect jumps and timing to survive. But sometimes the game felt really unfair. There were moments, where the game wouldn't show me or unlock another part of the platforms until I jumped and usually died because there wasn't anywhere to land.

The battle system was quite complex for how simple it was. There is one button for melee attack, one for dodge and one for ranged attack you unlock later in the game. Different enemies have different movesets and you really have to pay attention to not die immediately. There were some moment during bossfights, in which I felt like the hitboxes were a little bit off and some attacks were almost undodgeable. But this happened rarely.

Overall, this was exceptional experience in a form of game. 9.5/10.

While I was writing this post (I started at 17th), I also beat DARQ and Hollowbody. Yeah, I'm that bad at writing posts. So let's talk about them.

DARQ
DARQ is a horror-themed puzzle game that I first learned about years ago, when its' dev refused the deal with Epic Games for exclusivity on their store. It took me a while to get to it, but here we are!

The main gimmick of the game is changing perspective in a nightmarish environments. You can flip the whole map to walk on walls, switch rooms around to unlock new routes and more...

At the beginning, every level has a new way of changing perspective and the whole level is build around that. It's fun and no gimmick overstays its welcome. But about halfway the game, this stops and last 3-4 levels all use the same gimmick. And at that point, it becomes clear how shallow the gimmicks are and that they really can't hold more than one 15 minutes long level.

Most levels are short, usually taking place in some kind of a short hallway. Sometimes, the hallway takes an interesting form, like a moving train, other times it's just an uninteresting tunnel. Sometimes the levels have one huge puzzle you have to solve to beat the level, other times there is a series of shorter puzzles that needs to be solved to beat the level. But some levels felt a little bit short. Like I basically went in a straight line and used first item on the first interactable place in the level, then used second item on the second interactable place and that was it. And the final level is just one short action sequence of running away from a monster.

Since the game wants to be a horror game, it has monsters you have to dodge. But these parts are really boring and usually only include you waiting for the monster to turn away from you, hiding in a given spot and waiting for monster to leave. There is a dedicated stealth button, but you only need to use it twice in the whole game. And even then it sometimes work and sometimes doesn't work.

While I enjoyed the game's aesthetics, I wish there was more to the story. The game has no dialogues and there is almost no enviromental storytelling. You could probably put some pieces together and create connections between some things, but there is no evidence that your way of thinking is correct. This makes the game pretty forgettable, because while the horror-themed design of the game is cool, there is no depth to it.

Overall, it was quite disappointing game. It's shallow with its themes and gets boring towards the end. 6.5/10.

Hollowbody
Hollow body is a tribute to the original Silent Hill games. With all the good and bad it means.

I really enjoyed the audio-visual aspect, which is a close approximation of SH2 and 3. The devs really nailed the graphics and the overall feel of PS1 and PS2 era.

Gameplay-wise it was awfully close too SH, but I honestly think it could have been better. The beginning is excellent. The first location is an apartment complex, in which I gradually solved several non-linear puzzles at once. But then followed two locations that were terribly linear and didn't have much to offer. The second location is an alley behind the apartment complex, a park, and a cemetery with a chapel. Except you can barely explore anything there because the alleyway is strictly straight, the park has invisible walls in it, and the cemetery, while quite large, is completely empty. I first reached the end of the park, where there was a locked gate. Great, so I'll look for the key. Right by the gate I found a wallet with an access card to one of the barracks down the street. I got there, found a camera on the ground floor, picked it up, put it on a tripod on the first floor, it showed me to go to the building across the street. I get there, there's a bathtub with electrified water on the ground floor, so I have to find some kind of hook to get the plug out. Coincidentally, on the first floor, I can only interact with two items, which I combine into a hook... I found it terribly off-putting how the solution to the puzzle is actually right next to the puzzle. But then, the last location was pretty non-linear and fun.

The combat system was... well, very faithful to SH. Both in pros and cons. But I found it a bit odd that sometimes my attacks gave enemies a short stun and cancelled their attack, other times not. So sometimes an enemy would hit me out of nowhere when it really shouldn't have. There were a few melee and ranged weapons, but like a good gamer I was saving my ammo and hitting everything with my guitar. Surprisingly, I didn't avoid enemies much either. There weren't many locations where it was advantageous. There were many instances of enemies being in a closed spaces and you had to kill them to safely proceed. I did miss the bossfights a bit though. There was actually only one at the end. And that one didn't even need ammo, so I didn't use a shotgun, one of the two available ranged weapons, at all.

The story was pretty straightforward and simple. Your goal was to find your friend that got lost in the restricted dangerous area. The game takes place in a near future, in which bioterrorists attacked Europe and released a deadly virus. To stop it from spreading, a huge wall was build around the area. I really like this setting and wish to explore it more in future games (if there are any). I'm also proud of myself for figuring out one huge mystery right at the start of the game. I don't want to spoil it here tho.

Overall, it was fun game, with strong start and finish, but with mediocre parts in between. Nice homage to Silent Hill and classic survival horrors. 7.5/10.

 

[Janp]

Back again, this time earlier than the end of the month. No, scratch that... I'm a slow writer, and it's already the end of November. Anyway... I finished Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2. It was... good. My first Warhammer game, and I really like this setting. I think I might try more Warhammer games. Let's talk about it.

Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2
If you take a look at my list of finished games at the start of this thread, you might notice the lack of shooter games. It's not intentional, but it seems like a genre I don't play often. Most shooters on my list are boomer shooters. So, it was a nice change of pace to play Space Marine 2 after so many long RPGs and slow indies.

Space Marine 2 is one huge action sequence full of guns, blood, and testosterone from the very start to the finish. It's fairly short, but I think it's just enough, even for the 70€. Especially since the game has pretty active multiplayer in the form of a co-op campaign and PvP mode.

I haven't played the first one, but I didn't feel lost in the story that much. The game tells you everything you need to know. But it mostly boils down to "shoot this guy because the emperor says so". The story is simple and doesn't have a major role. The characters are there mostly to give you another mission or someone to shoot. They try to create some drama and tension between the player and other marines, but to be honest, I wasn't really feeling it, and it was a huge waste of time.

There are two campaigns to choose from. One singleplayer and one co-op. I played through both of them, and I like the idea behind connecting them. I also like that you can see them play out during each other. For example, as part of the story, you're cleaning a city overrun by wanna-be Aliens. There are several objectives, and you get to experience all of them through different missions, but they take place at the same time, so in each mission, you see other missions progressing.

But I feel like the singleplayer was somewhat lacking, especially in the AI department. Your companions were stupid. They literally just stood in the middle of the enemy swarm and did nothing. Or enemies target just me, and it got really tough, almost unplayable on higher difficulties.

The gameplay was fun. I tried several guns and weapons and quickly found my favourite combinations. I used a fairly aggressive approach in singleplayer but opted to play as a sniper in co-op missions. I was a little bit disappointed that the only huge hammer in-game was locked until the very last mission of singleplayer. It was teasing me all the time, yet I could barely use it. It's a shame, but at least I could try more different melee weapons.

Overall, this was a fine shooter game, whose biggest achievement was to make me interested in the Warhammer 40k universe. 8/10.

 

[Janp]

I'm a little late with my updates again. I beat the final set of games this year. Let's talk about them.

Another Crab's Treasure
An unexpected surprise this year. A colourful Souls-like game full of humour.

Another Crab's Treasure is an awesome addition to the Souls-like genre. I wasn't expecting much, because Souls-like games have a bad habit of not focusing on what made original Dark Souls such a wonderful game. But this game was on par with Lies of P that I played earlier this year, despite taking a different approach to the genre.

The cast of characters in this one are bunch of sea creatures with witty humour. With is a nice change from your regular Souls game with scarce and cryptic dialogues. Some jokes got a little old by the end, but I enjoyed the overall tone of the game.

You play as a hermit crab Kril. His shell gets taken away and he goes on an epic quest to get it back. Kril has an ability to use trash (cans, bittle caps, toys...) in the ocean as his shell. Each shell has a different ability and weight. I tried to use variety of shells, but found myself gravitating towards small and medium shells with attack-based and protective abilities. But each bossfight had a selection of shells that counter the given boss, so I also used them. For example, a boss with almost undodgeable attack had shells with Decoy ability (the shells takes the whole damage instead of Kril) in his arena. So it was useful to get familiar with as many shells as possible.

Kril uses a fork as his weapon. There is only one fork, but it can be upgraded. It can also be turned into makeshift hammer by sticking a shell on it. I used it as a hammer for majority of the game. As hammer, the fork is a little bit slower, but deals exponentially higher damage. Especially if you stick large shell on it.

I think bossfights were fun, a standard for a Souls-like game, but a lot of them were just another crab with some weapon. One had knife and fork, another one had a deadlock, another one had a straw... there wasn't that big of a variety here. I also had a hard time with some hitboxes, which were sometimes weirdly done. Like I was clearly outside the reach of a weapon, but still got hit. And vice versa, so his that were clearly a miss on my side hit the boss.

Overall, this was an awesome game with a nice twist on the Souls-like worldbuilding. 9/10.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (PS1)
All year long, I wanted to play more PS1 games to get that nice touch of nostalgia. I finally got to it with this game as part of this month's Game-Along.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is very dated game. I think it predates movies a little bit, because it takes some artistic freedom in some regards and feel like it's more based on books than movies. The game is about 4 hours long and it's crazy to me, because I used to play it a lot as a kid and swear it was a lot longer. I can't believe it's this short.

It's an action adventure game with bits of parkour. It's strictly linear and it doesn't let a player take a break and breath. One moment you're flying your broom, the next you're forced into a parkour course to get to the class... Yet, there are secrets you can find along the way. I was surprised by how many secrets I still remember from my childhood. While the mechanics are simple and accessible, they can sometimes feel clunky due to outdated controls and awkward camera angles.

There are also few minigames for quidditch and learning new spells. These are a lot easier than their PC version counterparts. But there is a lot of Flipendo puzzles. So many that you'll have the incantation for Flipendo burned in your brain for years after playing.

For its time, the graphics were serviceable, but by today's standards, they're undeniably dated. The characters have blocky designs and often exaggerated facial expressions that unintentionally add a humorous charm to the game. The environments, while limited in detail, are colorful and capture the magical essence of the wizarding world.

Overall, it was fun game that is really rough around the edges. 6.5/10.

And that's all for this year. I'll hopefully finish and post my year evaluation and GOTY on time on Tuesday.

 

[Janp]

Okay, let's wrap 2024 up. It was a fairly fun year. I became a father, and so I didn't game as much as before in the second half of the year. But it also made me pick my games with a little bit more caution. I also started dropping more games if they didn't catch my attention that much right from the start. Which is something I really had to learn years ago, because I played games I didn't enjoy that much for way too long. This journal is a huge proof of that.

This year, I played 33 unique games, par Gothic which I don't count towards the total number. Technically, I did 35 runs, because I also played Baldur's Gate 3 twice. This year, I played plenty of longer games. lots of RPGs with 50+ or even 80+ gametime. I felt a little burned out of them towards the end of the year, but I would love to play some more RPGs in 2025. I also started preferring recently released games, since I know that with my limited free time I would probably never play them otherwise.

In total, I spent about 818.47 hours playing games this year. I didn't count every game played in that (I don't keep track of time of my challenge runs in Pokémon games anymore), but it's about a tenth of the entire year. I think that's nice.

I averaged a 7.5 (out of 10) for games played. My highest rating was 9.5, and I gave it to two games (Baldur's Gate 3 and Neva). The lowest grade was 5 and I gave it to two games (Yu-Gi-Oh! Rush Duel and The Suicide of Rachel Foster).

Out of 33 games, 10 were RPGs. Of those, 5 were JRPGs, 2 were CRPGs (one of them played twice), and the rest were Souls or classic western RPGs. I also played quite a few puzzle games, but only played 1 horror game.

Anyway, here's the ranking of all games I played this year...

33
The Suicide of Rachel Foster

The Suicide of Rachel Foster has a wonderfully handled location of an abandoned hotel in the middle of nowhere. The game evokes a super creepy atmosphere and keeps playing with the idea of whether the main character is alone in the hotel or not. The gameplay is weaker compared to the standard walking sim games. But the whole game is dragged down by the story, which glorifies pedophilia and grooming as something romantic and misunderstood.

32
Yu-Gi-Oh! Rush Duel: Dawn of the Battle Royale!!

I like Yu-Gi-Oh! a lot, I've played it up quite a bit this year. But this game was weird. Although the central element of Yu-Gi-Oh! is building your own deck, this game doesn't allow for that. Instead, the player must play with one of the pre-made decks. If they get enough cards for one. Which cost several times more than the player gets throughout the story. A really strange and failed attempt at a game.

31
Super Mario Land

Super Mario Land 1 is a Mario platformer for the Game Boy. And I imagine it must have been amazing back then. But I honestly don't see much reason to play this game nowadays. Mario is hard to control, the levels are incredibly simple and trivial, and the whole thing doesn't even take an hour to finish.

30
Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins

Sequel is a bit better, it has more interesting locations, but it's still probably not a Mario game that everyone needs to play.

29
Dragon's Dogma 2

Dragon's Dogma 2 is probably the biggest disappointment of the year. I can't say a single thing about this game that wasn't either botched or downright bad. It reminds me of the Switch Pokémon games in quality. A game that is heavily behind the times and has no business being made in 2024.

28
Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion

I've wanted to try this game for a long time because it looked like something I would enjoy. And it wasn't downright bad, but tha game shows all of the mechanics and jokes in the first few minutes of play. For the rest of the game there is one repeated joke that the game outright beats the player over the head with. And gameplay is similarly boring.

27
Please, touch the artwork

I was intrigued by this puzzle game. All puzzles are abstract images that follow their own rules. But it seems to me that the developer didn't fully exploit this potential and a lot of the puzzles are actually exactly the same, without any major innovation. The game has 3 types of puzzles and honestly I only found 1 type interesting, the other 2 were pretty weak.

26
DARQ

DARQ is a visually unique game that combines horror with perspective puzzles. Unfortunately, despite its short gameplay time, it's quite repetitive and ultimately doesn't really have much to offer beyond the initial wow effect.

25
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Played mostly for nostalgia, the first Harry Potter hasn't aged well in terms of gameplay, but it still retains a magical atmosphere.

24
Solasta: Crown of the Magister

Solasta is incredibly unlucky in that I also played Baldur's Gate 3 this year, so I couldn't avoid comparing the two games. And Solasta came out (at times shamefully) the loser of that comparison. Solasta has an incredibly good combat system true to D&D. Unfortunately at the expense of everything else.

23
Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls

I enjoyed Final Fantasy I a lot. It was a nice probe into a time when the RPG genre was in its infancy. Final Fantasy II has a cool story, but it was brought down a lot by the boring and grinding combat for me. I'll have to play the other installments next year.

22
Untitled Goose Game

Playing with a sassy goose is a nice thing to do at first, but it gets ugly very quickly. Annoying people is pretty much the same and uninventive for the whole (and quite short) game.

21
Marvel's Spider-man: Miles Morales

I wasn't too thrilled with the continuation of the Spider-Man saga, and I was extremely positive about the first installment. I don't know, it felt like it was taking the worst bits of the original game and making a whole new game out of them. Perhaps every enemy here can only be defeated with one specific attack. Story-wise it's very tepid, buit maybe that's just me not knowing Miles' rogue gallery as well as Peter's.

20
Persona 5 Royal

I played the modern trilogy of Persona games this year. This installment, while the best in terms of gameplay (with the best bossfights and simulator of teenager life), the story, pacing and especially the dialogue are so incredibly bad that they drag the whole experience down terribly.

19
Donkey Kong

I played the original Donkey Kong mostly out of curiosity. I was surprised that there was more than that one iconic level. I spent a while in it, it was good for entertainment.

18
Soul Blade

Soul Blade is another game I played mostly out of nostalgia. Fighting games aren't exactly a genre I play, this was the first fighting game I've played in x years. Yeah, I still enjoyed Soul Blade after all these years.

17
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 Portable

It was evident that the formula in the third Persona was still new. At times quite bare and simple, but at the same time quite entertaining.

16
Hollowbody

Hollowbody is a well-made old-school survival horror film that is a bit too linear for my taste. Mainly in that the puzzle solution is mostly a few steps away from the puzzle assignment. Otherwise, it manages to evoke the atmosphere of the original Silent Hills perfectly.

15
Xenoblade Chronicles 3

The original Xenoblade Chronicles is the gold standard JRPG for me. The third one was a bit weaker in my opinion, especially in story and characters, but gameplay-wise I enjoyed it quite a bit. I enjoyed trying out the different classes and their combinations. I liked the world too, it was fun to explore. On the other hand, it was a very long game. It would have definitely benefited from a bit shorter length.

14
The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo

A short art P&C adventure game that relies mainly on its art style. An enjoyable affair, it's just a shame that it's only the first part of a bigger whole that may never come out.

13
Infinifactory

One of the hardest puzzle games I've ever played. I spent quite a bit of time in it. And even more outside of it, because I was thinking about the solutions to the levels in the evenings and while working.

12
Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2

Action shooters aren't my usual repertoire either, but Space Marine was a big hit at a time when I needed something quick and easy to turn my brain off.

11
Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden

Banishers is a well executed action adventure game about two ghost hunters. I especially appreciate the originality in the creation of the side quests, which all work on the "I'm being haunted by a ghost" principle, but each takes a different approach.

10
TELETEXT

Czech TELETEXT is an original one-shot. Quite short and quite hard, but with a good idea and visual identity.

9
Pikmin 4

This was the first Pikmin adventure I played. And I'd honestly like to try the previous ones next year. The time management of the little critters was fun. So was the miniature view of our world. This game actually only had one major flaw - the ending is one big, boring bossrush that doesn't fit this game at all.

8
Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

I like 2D Zelda games. I played Link to the Past for the first time and I enjoyed it more than I expected. I need to play more Zeldas this year.

7
Another Crab's Treasure

I played Another Crab's Treasure a few days ago, so maybe it's a victim of recency bias, but I really enjoyed this Souls game. Especially the colour and humour. But even gameplay-wise it was better than I would have expected at first glance.

6
Chants of Sennaar

Chants of Sennaar is a fun puzzle game about deciphering the unfamiliar languages. I felt like a real Sherlock Holmes when I was able to deduce the meaning of some characters.

5
Persona 4 Golden

Persona 4 was another game that made me feel like Sherlock Holmes. Or more like Shinichi Kudo, since this game is set in Japan and you play as a teenager. Gameplay-wise it's somewhere between three and five, but the writing is really well masterful. Both the main story and the characters. I really enjoyed this one.

4
Lies of P

Classic Souls-like game. Lies of P has mastered this genre perfectly. Depressing, sometimes disgusting, full of giant swords and even bigger bosses.

3
Hyperbolica

A play set in non-Euclidean worlds. Worlds where perspective and the laws we know work in a completely different way. The originality and craftsmanship in this game is incredible.

2
Baldur's Gate 3

Baldur's Gate 3 is the first new game in ~6 years that I've played more than once, and the only one I'd play multiple times in a year. And I'm planning another run. It's the RPG I've been wanting since Dragon Age: Origins. Not without its flaws, but it has completely consumed me.

1
Neva

Neva has an amazing audiovisual aspect complemented by fun gameplay and a heartwarming story. It's a game that gets under your skin and plays with your emotions from start to finish.


​

And that's it for 2024. Let's hope 2025 will be as great as this one. I want to play more new releases, I'm really looking forward Kingdom Come: Deliverence 2, DOOM, new Monster Hunter, Hlina, Lost Records, A Game About Digging A Hole and many, many more games. And I still have a small backlog I accumulated this year (after clearing it last year).

 

[Janp]

Okay, it's finally time to start with updates this year. And we are starting strong. A new Indiana Jones game got released last month. I was looking forward to it. I love Indiana Jones movies, so I didn't hesitate to get this game. I was a little worried that it wouldn't live up to my expectations, but it did. To be completely honest, this game has a huge potential to be my GOTY this year. I know, it's the first game I've played this year so far, but...

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
How do I start with this one?

It's an interesting take on an immersion sim featuring the world's greatest professor. I think immersion sim describes the game the best. You're put in front of a problem and are free to solve it any way you want. You can usually opt in for a stealthy approach, using a disguise or some kind of decoy, or you can go in guns blazing. There are usually multiple entrances to each important location, each with its positives and negatives.

There are 3 bigger open areas and some more linear smaller ones, but each one of them offers some kind of freedom. My favourite is the Vatican, because of its verticality. You have to move through buildings, but not all of them are accessible from the ground. You have to get to the roof and find an open window first. But you also get access to the underground and sewers, making this level unbelievably connected and complex. The second open level in Gizah was fine, but certainly a downgrade, since it's mostly a flat map with some underground tombs. The final open level... was a mistake. A flooded jungle sounds like an interesting concept, but the execution was horrible. You have to use a boat, which has terrible controls, Indy gets stuck everywhere, and the game is bugged as hell to the point that Indy started walking on water in some parts. Some dialogue was playing way out of place, for example, Indy was all alone, and suddenly a story dialogue I had already heard started playing. And this was also a level in which I realized I had Raytracing set on max. The whole game could handle it to the point I didn't even notice any FPS drops, but this level couldn't even get past 10 FPS in some instances. This level also somehow crashed my PC and disconnected my SSD. And changed the resolution of my monitor. I was glad it was the shortest open level, and I quickly got to the finale.

It took me some time to get used to the battle system, because my left mouse button controlled Indy's right hand and vice versa. I also figured out how the countering attacks work at the start of the second location. I never used Indy's revolver, bar the one moment I tested it out and then reloaded, because it wasn't worth it. And not just Indy's revolver, but every gun was disappointing, and I only used them when the game forced me to it in linear segments. Melee weapons, on the other hand, were excellent and fun to use. I (like in most games) gravitated to the huge and heavy weapons that could knock out even the biggest Nazi.

I enjoy the leveling system, if you could call it that. You have to find special books that will make Indy better and stronger. And while there are some that are just "punch harder" or "reload faster", there are also some that will unlock new abilities. My favourite are books that let you knock out enemies using your whip. There is the real sense of progression, and my Indy was almost unstoppable by the end of the game.

I don't want to get too spoilery with the story, but I enjoy every moment of it. The cast of characters is colourful and fun, especially every clash of Indy and the main villain. I found some interactions between Indy and Gina boring, but to be honest, I found Gina to be an uninteresting character. I also wish some parts were playable instead of them being a cutscenes, because they would be fun to experience firsthand.

Overall, this feels like the lost Indiana Jones movie that we were meant to get after Crusade. 9.5/10.

 

[Janp]

And while we're at it, I also beat my Game-Along - Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone on GBA. Yes, I'm doing it. I'm playing every version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. No, not for any particular reason.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (GBA)
Last month I played PS1 version of this game and while it had some problems, it scratched my nostalgia just right. I never played this one before, therefore I'll probably be harsher.

I wouldn't say the game is bad. It's just... mediocre and gets boring quickly. There are like 3 types of levels. One, in which you have to collect 6 copies of one item; one, in which you have to stealthily get from point A to point B and the flying levels. The first types are probably the best out of the three. You usually have to use the newly obtained spell to solve some puzzles or beat enemies. I think my favourite was Wingardium Leviosa level. On the other hand, flying levels were as awful as they can get. The broom is almost uncontrollable and it gets worse the faster it gets.

While I like the art style of the game, there was so much backtracking that I got fed up with Hogwarts' halls and forest. I still can't decide if I like the low-quality portraits of all characters. Some are goofy, for example Harry's portrait every time he picks up yucky Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans, some were just ugly.

The game was quite easy, but it was made worse by the fact that Harry had to stop every time he casted Flipendo, Flipendo only worked in short distance and enemies could easily walk around it. And falling down the pit completely restarts the level.

Overall, it was playable, but mediocre and annoying. Luckily, it only took about 3 hours to beat. 5/10.