Super belated September report

I have been behind on these, but I like to keep them formatted like this for the sake of… IDK, “completeness”.

The big one this month was Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove. I had started the Shovel of Hope campaign a long time ago and lost interest very early. I begrudgingly finished that campaign (in short: it’s often too old school for its own good and it’s simply not particularly fun to play as Shovel Knight) but then was ultra delighted with Specter of Torment and finished off by playing the lesser but still strong King of Cards. While I must warn that the package isn’t really worth the high price (for $40 full price and $32 on sale you can get quite a lot more indie goodies; with getting the games individually being barely above those prices), it was still a quite fun experience.

Also finished Four Sided Fantasy (turns out I was super close to the ending) and played a bit of NG+, for which I am not sure what’s different, but it’s still super fun. Not all the solutions are elegant, with both solutions based on slightly underexplaine mechanics and others where the solution is a bit too obvious for its own good, but each mechanic (all variations on a theme) stays the right amount of time. It’s currently bundled so I highly recommend picking this one up.

Got back and finished SIMULACRA. A few of the late game tasks were slightly frustrating and missed a couple personal objectives with regards to how I wanted to play the choices out, but it was still a nice experience. It slightly overstays its welcome and some of the twists feel weaker than they could be as a result, but I may try a few other routes later (sadly the game doesn’t have manual saves so branch experiments may be slightly hard to do, unless NG+ features chapter resets).

I’d picked up Earthworms in an earlier sale, and it’s quite a fun point and click adventure. Most obtuse thing is one puzzle where the solution is to simply guess a (short) combination, so while it’s not the cleverest puzzle game, it never felt like my task was guessing the developers’ thoughts. Definitely shows itself as a budget title ($6 with reuglar 90% discounts) with how limited flavour text is and how specific a few of the combinations tend to be, but the atmosphere is amazing.

On the flipside of, Bad Dream: Coma. Had to restart because I accidentally skipped some important dialogue which made things very unclear, then started a second file to try to go for two separate playstyles in terms of morality. Said system means that while the endgoals have different routes, a whole lot of the inventory ends up being kinda useless. Doesn’t help that while in retrospect something is the good or bad version, quite a few of them are ambiguous when just clicking. Played a bit over an hour with all of these combined and while I may force myself to finish it, it’s not a priority by any means.

Advanced a bit more in Environmental Station Alpha, and it’s still a mostly frustrating experience. It’s not badly designed per se, but around every corner is something which doesn’t quite work. It’s super hyped in some Metroidvania circles but I am unsure if I’ll finish it. This ended in a semi-ragequit over none of the available paths I had at the moment being the clear way forward.

Tesla vs Lovecraft **, **The Binding of Isaac*, and to a lesser degree PUSS! (I haven’t beat the first set of levels so far, though this last time I wasn’t on my A-game) were just timekillers. My progress in Hollow Knight was almost non-existent (got to the end of the first Pantheon, but can’t consistently kill those bosses, advanced a bit more in the other two available ones, trained on a few scattered bosses in the Hall of Gods).

Started Skautfold: Shrouded in Sanity but there’s some glitches which keep me from even finishing the tutorial. There’s a fix suggested in the forums, but haven’t tried that yet.