August 2021

It’s been a year since my last post! While I’ve beaten a bunch of games since then, I’d like to focus on a few that I finished more recently. I wanted to get a post done before uni really ramps up this semester, because once it does I will have very little time for gaming or BLAEO posting. Week 2 has just finished and things are already starting to get hectic.

• Bounty Train
  

  25 hours playtime

  18 of 30 achievements

• Faerie Solitaire
  

  15 hours playtime

  30 of 30 achievements

• Fae Tactics
  

  60 hours playtime

  9 of 10 achievements

Lately I have been prioritising SteamGifts wins as I would like to be a part of the group Playing Matters someday soon (hello future PM recruiter, if you’re reading this). Sometime between my last post and now I actually did manage to get half of my SG wins to >25% achievements, which was a pretty longstanding goal of mine (and one of the minimum requirements for the PM group). That milestone has since been steadily creeping towards 60% of games with 25% or more achievements.

Bounty Train
Despite this, the first game that I have properly enjoyed in a while wasn’t actually an SG win. I don’t remember when I bought this one - probably from a bundle or through trading, but I found it in my library and decided to give it a go. Took an hour or so to get settled with the mechanics and the tutorial, but after that I was off. I really liked the trading mechanic - it reminded me of Caravan. I wasn’t too keen on the combat, but thankfully there were sliders to adjust both the difficulty and frequency of these encounters. Worked my way through the main campaign, followed by the DLC campaign, picking up as many achievements as I could along the way. Decided not to stick around to grind the rest of the achievements, as the ones I had left were rather luck-based and I was getting a bit sick of the mild tediousness by this point. Overall fun game - hope to find more like this one in the backlog.

Faerie Solitare
Nice little game to grind to 100%. Pretty boring, but not bad while watching YouTube or something. Was nice to complete another SG win.

Fae Tactics
This was a big one - another SG win as well. The last achievement got away from me as it required an NG+ run, which I don’t think I could handle. I even borrowed a friend’s save file (same may consider this cheating, but I just wanted to see if it was possible) and I couldn’t beat the final boss, so there you go. Aside from that, it was an awesome game and massively underrated. A couple minor complaints (unskippable cutscenes!), but the game itself was very polished and the gameplay was fun.

There have been a number of great bundles & sales this year, so it’s quite likely my backlog has grown and not shrunk over the past year.

Welp, it’s back to the uni grind for me. I recently changed my major, so at least I’m enjoying what I’m doing a bit more now. Looking forward to beating some more games, but realistically I won’t have much time until the next holidays. Also I got a kitten.

Cya then!