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Yesterday
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Outer Wilds
42 hours playtime
31 of 31 achievements
Report #426: Outer Wilds
This game is the perfect example of: Just stick to it.
Basically the first coule of minutes I did sometime in 2020 or 2021. Did not understand the game and put it away.
Now 5 years later, after a colleague recommended it to me to play I started it again and really liked it. Had to get used to having absolutely no guidance and just start exploring.
Only negative to say: There are DLC achievements which are broken. Or at least the description is very misleading.
April Assassination #5 (Backlog)
Please consider liking my review on Steam - it means a lot to me!
Imagine GNOG, but with way fewer contraptions to interact with and lots and lots of forced, heavy-handed 'plot' supposed to be an emotional roller-coaster where the protagonist fixes people's lives by fixing their objects.
It's not a bad game per se, and technically there's very little to fault, but I would be prepared to pay more money for this game if it had way less dialogue and 'story' (honestly, I could survive if it had none) and instead had more objects to repair.
Apr 24 2026
Rise of the Tomb Raider is a thrilling, frostbitten survival adventure where scaling Siberian ice walls, battling grizzly bears, and raiding breathtaking ancient ruins becomes a part of your fun adventure. ~9/10
Getting 100% achievement for the game is too much though, with a collectible type which you cannot even see until your next to it, getting gold on all the score attacks and finding a co-op partner for survival playthrough.
Played on SteamBlue Fire is a great precision platformer, with smooth controls. Precision platformers are not my cup of tea, but the controls of this game made me go through with it. It took me way too many tries on some of the voids than I care to admit.
Control is a beautiful surreal experience and a brutalist playground where physics is a suggestion and throwing desks with your mind is the ultimate power trip. ~9/10
Although DOGS THROWING SWORDS II: Three Barks To The Wind was in that 1700+ itch.io bundle from six years ago, I checked the page recently to see if it had been updated since I downloaded it and I noticed it had gone free to play. For that price, it’s a pretty decent–albeit short and basic–shoot-em-up. The second (final) boss is the same as the first, but there’s still variety since the arena now has spikes you have to avoid. The levels could scroll a bit faster and the enemies maybe take a bit too long to die sometimes, but it’s a solid game overall, and I recommend it. You can download it here: https://itsmelilyv.itch.io/dogsthrowingswords2
I also recently learned that if a game on your wishlist goes free-to-play, Steam does NOT send you an email like they do when it gets discounted; I had to find this out from that “Free 2 Plays That Were Once Buyable” thread:
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Unless
54 minutes playtime
15 of 32 achievements
Platformer. Standard left/right movement, jump, and wall-jump.
As I said when I posted about its demo, the controls are responsive and the level design is decent, with frequent checkpoints and fair enemies (except the torches in world 2; those things do NOT look like hazards!). Also, although berries are needed to unlock four bonus levels, and the only way to get enough berries for them is to beat previous levels fast enough, the entire main campaign can be finished just by beating the levels normally. Problem there is that the entire main campaign is only 42 minutes long, and that’s going based on Steam’s timer; the in-game timer that only measures level playtime had me at slightly less than 21 minutes. Plus, you don’t unlock berry levels by simply obtaining the amount shown on them; you have to SPEND that many berries to unlock them individually, and although you get 25 berries for each level you B rank, you’re also just as likely to get a C rank on your first play-through of a level, which gives you zero berries.
On top of this, although the levels in world 1, 2, and 4 cost between 125 and 150 berries each to unlock, the dev(s) randomly decided to make the one in world 3 cost a whopping 225 berries! When I beat the game, I had enough for the other three (again, combined ‘cuz you have to spend the berries), but I didn’t have enough for that one, so I just edited my save file to change the level’s unlock status from false to true, and you know what? None of the berry levels are that much harder or more special compared to the levels in the main campaign. I was disappointed.
After you beat those four berry-locked levels, you unlock four more levels that ARE supposed to be much harder, and you know what? They’re not. Beat them and you’ve beaten every level in the game…in 54 minutes, not even half of the Steam refund window. There isn’t even a level editor despite the lack of content and despite the game’s story being about spreading the joy of creating your own Worlds. It feels like there were bigger plans for this game that fell through, or that the dev(s) focused too much on appealing to speedrunners that they didn’t put enough effort into appealing to casual players.
By the way, even after beating all of those extra levels, I still didn’t have the 225 berries needed to unlock the world 3 berry level that I cheated to access.
Still, the game is pretty good overall, especially for free, and even if you don’t cheat to unlock a berry level like I did, you can still have a decent (if slightly disappointing) time just playing through the main campaign and leaving it at that. Recommended.
P.S. I will say, though: I’m convinced that it’s impossible to get to 4-3 from 4-2. The glass platform reforms too quickly for you to get the height needed to boost from the portal; I always either didn’t have enough height or I hit my head on the glass as soon as it reformed. The only way I finally reached 4-3 was by backtracking from the start of the world and going past 4-4.
Apr 23 2026
Viewfinder is a refreshing puzzle game, using a mechanic I have never seen before. Puzzles are great, although on the easy side. Some new mechanics are gradually introduced but not too many of them since game is not very long. That was a positive thing for me as it doesn’t overstay its welcome. Story generally isn’t that important in games like this, and it is Viewfinder’s weakest part. I stopped caring about it very early as it was very boring, no mystery about it or wandering what will happen next.
Metaphor: ReFantazio is an exquisite game. I haven’t played anything from Atlus before so this was my entry ticket into that world of dungeons, social bonds and careful calendar management. It is much more lenient than Persona games, but if you are careless you could miss your chance to do some stuff you wanted.
First impression was not positive at all - game has problems with some wireless headphones. Not all of them but Xbox Wireless Headset which I own is one of them and it is known problem since release and they haven’t patched it. It is not some minor incovinience - there is no sound, at all! I have tried everything, every troubleshooting advice on the web and none of them worked. When you change audio source in-game you could hear music for a second and after that back to silent. In the end I had to connect them via cable which solved the problem.
From the start first thing I noticed is best-in-business menu and UI design. Game is a masterpiece in that department, it doesn’t get better than this. There are a lot of UI tutorial prompts in the first couple of hours for every single thing and new game mechanic. It didn’t bother me at all since they were short and to the point. Metaphor has captivating world with very interesting lore and I constantly wanted to find out more about it. Politics, religion, inequality and racism are heavily incorporated in it so it is not just about the hero saving the world. Nothing in the world is black and white, even main villain has some validating arguments for things he’s doing. Story is very linear, there are not any major choices or story forks which is good since the game is huge. There are more than 40 archetypes (classes, jobs) in game with a couple of skills each, and when characters learn other ones they can inherit those skills and use them in addition to their main ones. We also have synthesis skills that require 2 specific archetypes be present in the party in order to use them, so the number of combination you could make is endless.
Funny thing from my first big dungeon - I didn’t know that MP is premium at the beginning of the game and that you have to manage it very carefully. I was almost empty and just arrived to do a boss fight. You can’t do it even if you are half full, and there is no vendor to buy MP replenishment like it was in the tutorial dungeon. They don’t have to be done in one day, you can return to town to sleep off and return tomorrow to continue from where you left off. But there was a problem - I have wasted days doing relationship bonds and I could’t get back since from the story perspective I have to do it this day. Tried to return and was greeted with a game over screen.
Am I softlocked? Fortunately no, since if protagonist is using Mage archetype he refills 1MP to each party member for overworld kills (enemies that are weaker than you and you don’t enter turn-based battles fighting them). And so the grind started - clear all of them to get 20MP or so in 10 minutes, exit dungeon so they can respawn. Rinse and repeat for an hour :D
In the end I had so much fun playing the game, although I wouldn’t recommend spending 100+ hours in a game in just 2 weeks.
April Assassination #4 (Backlog)
Played on itch.ioOne of the best walking simulators I had the pleasure of playing. For a game where you barely do anything more than walking left and right and interacting with NPCs and certain objects, this keep me hooked more than it had any right to.
What makes Night In The Woods from a good to a great game its the quality of the writing. All characters are multi-layered and believable, and their interactions always go a layer deeper than you would expect. Not only that, but everyone has some pathos, including the setting i.e. the city of Possum Springs. Trauma is everywhere, like it or not. What changes is how people react to it and deal with it. And our protagonist, Mae Borowski, is really flawed, which just gives a lot of room to create these situations where emotionally unstable folks just clash and have to deal with the fallout later. It's great.
The production values are also pretty high. The UI is clean and allow you to focus and take in the environment. Animations are fluid and every scene is shock-full of detail and props that enhance the believability. The soundtrack, man, is glorious. And don't get me started on the journal, so shock-full of personality just through doodles. The game sprinkles minigames every now and then to switch things up, and it really helps. Things like band practice, miracle babies feeding time, eating pizza, opening windows, etc. It didn't need to do that, but I'm glad it does.
All in all, it's one of those games that refuses to be explained. When you put all cards on the table, it sounds boring or subpar. When you play it, it's a vibe and works much better than you would expect. It has to be played slowly, maybe one day at a time, so there's enough time for all the themes to sink in. I highly, highly recommend it for anyone who has the minimal interest on walking sims and just human nature and the tragedy of human condition.
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The Rush
88 minutes playtime
no achievements
This game was really close to being a great free shoot-em-up, but it makes a few notable missteps. First, although the game sets you back to a checkpoint when you die (in one hit), the game still has the gall to have limited lives (max you can set is 9). Also, although Training Mode lets you play any stage from the get go without having to reach it in Arcade Mode first, it still only lets you play a level from the start or from the boss rather than let you retry from any specific checkpoint between them. Sure, you can get around this by going to your AppData/Local/The_Rush_Laptop folder and opening the game’s settings file in Notepad to give yourself 999 lives, but this obviously wasn’t intended; the game was meant to be tedious for no reason, and it kills me that so many Shmups do this. Second, bullets can be kinda hard to see sometimes, especially since I’m pretty sure they get drawn behind your own bullets, so a lot of your deaths will be from shots you didn’t even see, and trying to do a blind play-through of Arcade Mode legitimately will get you a game over on level 2 or 3 (out of 8). Third, some of the enemies and hazards require trial-and-error before you’ll understand how they operate, like how the stage 4 boss shoots directly at you for every shot you land on it (something that nothing else in the game will do) or how level 7 has gates suddenly close when they reach specific points in the autoscroll (not always the same points that previous gates closed at).
Overall, there’s a lot of good here, especially for a free game, but the missteps still make it kinda hard to recommend.
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Funky Panic Attack
53 minutes playtime
no achievements
First-person platformer. Standard left stick to walk and right stick to look around, A button double-jumps, RT fires your freeze-gun (which you only get if you go through the tutorial) though the lack of reticle makes it hard to aim, Y advances dialogue, and RB toggles a mode where you move faster but constantly bounce. If you freeze a moving platform, jumping off of it will launch you in the direction that platform was moving when you froze it, which is an interesting concept, but it really just makes it kinda annoying to make the long jumps you’re expected to, especially when you only barely miss reaching the next platform despite having toggled on the fast-moving bouncing mode and double-jumped. Making those jumps feels a bit more like luck than skill.
Level design is pretty good. Checkpoints are frequent and hazards are fair. Only issues I had besides the aforementioned launch mechanic is that hazards can sometimes unfreeze faster than you expect and kill you when you’ve just moved past them and can’t see them anymore, and also the fact that frozen hazards still deal contact damage, but both of those are things you can get used to.
It’s also worth mentioning that the game ends very abruptly. The protagonist finds a picture of people who “look familiar,” and then nothing ever comes of that. Near the end, the protagonist mentions that she doesn’t sense what she’s looking for nearby, but then ten seconds later, you enter a door and find exactly that and the credits show up and you’re back to the title screen. It definitely feels like there were bigger plans for this game that fell through, and the demo for its sequel has an entirely new cast of characters, so unless I missed a hidden Easter egg somewhere, the questions raised by this game will remain unanswered (the secret area shown in the game’s only Steam Guide just raises more questions).
Overall, it’s okay for a free game, so I can recommend it.
Apr 22 2026
April Assassination #3 (SG Win / PoP Pick)
Please consider liking my review on Steam - it means a lot to me!
Chernobylite is a hesitant thumbs up for me. TL;DR it is a game with great production values, a solid plot (hard to follow at times and with a poor twist at the end), and a really well-developed universe to explore and live in, but that is marred by poor pacing and repetitive gameplay. At 30 bucks, if will be worth if you buy it, but you'll have to endure some repetitive stuff to see the credits roll. Buyer beware.
Now, let's dive a bit deeper. The absolute highlight of this game is the universe you'll be playing in. Combine real-world locations that were scanned for the game with great visual effects and texture work, and you will feel like you're in Chornobyl, period. The soundtrack, the fog, the rain, everything contributes to that aura and atmosphere so thick you can cut with a knife. The first time you enter each map is particularly exhilarating, as you never know what to expect, or where. Each area has a ton of landmarks that allow you to navigate effectively without the map, and I had a lot of fun just being in that world. At least at first. Some of the earlier cracks I noticed in the game was the fact that every character (NPC or enemy) in the game wears a mask, clearly done to avoid animating faces, and the poor optimization (I had to tune every setting to the minimum and still could barely crack 30 FPS, whereas I played Elden Ring and RDR2 in higher settings with better performance).
So graphics and music/sound effects are good, but what about gameplay? Here things start to get iffy. Chernobylite alternates between a stealth game and an action shooter, with emphasis on stealth particularly early on, before you have enough resources to spend them on full-on combat encounters. As a stealth game, it works but it's not great - enemies are kind of stupid, they see you but then you hide behind a small bush and they pretend you were gone and never there. You can bait enemies by staying long enough in their vision cone that they decide to investigate, which allows for easy pickings. I used a crossbow early in my game, which is supposed to be a silent weapon, and half the times it would be silent, the other half it would alert the whole camp of my presence immediately, and it was never clear when or where that would happen. If you can tolerate the slow patrol cycles of your enemies, you can usually clear enemy camps without being noticed, at least early in the game before your enemies start wearing body armor and helmets. And this is an efficient way of saving resources, but very boring, repetitive, and unengaging gameplay loop, which is a terrible combination. Stealth is also problematic in an open-world game like this one (each map is a small open-world, with you having a lot of freedom on how to move around) since it's easy to just avoid combat and go somewhere else if you want, as the game area is usually mostly open fields. This is great if you want to evade patrols, but terrible if they spot you since being detected means 4-5 enemies immediately converging to your position, with little defensive cover, and them having perfect accuracy. Remember the small bush that made you invisible before? Now you're exposed butt-naked even behind it.
Well, eventually you'll have to forfeit stealth and go into combat mode. Before you get a fully upgraded weapon of choice (I alternated between a rifle and the railgun), you'll be handicapped. Weapons can only be shot when aiming down sights (shooting without ADS executes a melee attack), and the shooting is tactical in the sense there's a lot of sway and recoil. In places with cover, tactical shooting is incredible, but in an open field with enemies flanking you from all sides, arcade shooting would have been more appropriate. At some point you'll be forced into combat because enemies start getting helmets, which prevents you from one-shotting them with a silent weapon such as a crossbow, and body armor which prevents you from stealth melee-killing them. Once I had my fully upgraded rifle, those combat encounters became laughable because you can choose to initiate most encounters, and since it's more tactical than arcade-y, having better ground will usually leave you on the upper hand. With a fully upgraded rifle, for instance, it's not hard to clear a full encampment with 5-6 heavily armored dudes without taking a hit, simply choosing where to initiate combat from and letting them charge into you.
Which is to say that the enemy encounters go from dull and boring (early game) to easy and unengaging once you have your arsenal upgraded. It's a weird progression and while it's satisfying to clear a level killing everyone without taking a hit, it makes me confused if this is a stealth or tactical combat game.
Early on you'll rely a lot on exploration and resource-gathering, and this is a very fun part of the game. You have to craft structures at your base to improve life for your allies, and also craft consumables to use in missions, including ammo. Early on everything is hard to come by and you'll be scrapping to craft anything. By the halfway mark, I had all structures built, all weapons fully upgraded, and a lot of field structures in place to use throughout missions, so the survival pressure was entirely off. At that point, I started rushing through the maps, since I didn't need resources anymore and I had seen everything on each map, even though the game still forced me to re-visit them frequently for the story missions.
And here's the game biggest flaw - the pacing. Structurally, you have 25-30 story missions, taking place on a selection of 6-7 maps. Meaning you'll be revisiting each map 5-6 times at least. It might not sound bad, but the third time you go into a map, you know it already. You probably already cleared each corner, and there's very little surprise. Still, you're forced to trek 5-10 minutes from one end to the other of this mostly empty map with a lot of resources you don't need and enemies you can either completely overpower or ignore. And this is when I really thought about abandoning the game - I was already 15 hours in and felt I had seen and done everything I wanted, and yet, had barely touched half the story missions. The story itself is interesting (even thou the final twist is crap) and has some good choices to be made throughout (which also are mostly irrelevant since they can be changed at any time, they clearly signal to you if they were good or bad the moment you make them, and they don't truly affect the ending), so it feels like they stuck a half-finished choices made onto a good story, added some padding and hoped you would continue playing long after the game stopped being fun.
All in all, it's not a bad game. But I think it would be such a superior game if it was half as long, and made you only visit each map once or twice. As I said in the beginning -- not a bad game, but buyer beware.