Beaten and completed

Finished 12 Labours of Hercules VII: Fleecing the Fleece and a couple of days later the 8th part was on sale for a euro and something so I went ahead and got that too. I’m starting to think I’m lowkey addicted. They gameplay stays pretty much the same throughout the series, adding a new mechanic every now and then. I think it’s the first time I’ve actually noticed they never used thieves again? I kinda disliked them but it’s weird that it’s the only thing that never appeared again. I’m playing another game from the same publisher and developer but good god it sucks, I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish it, just makes me appreciate this series more, but it also makes me wonder how they screwed up a reskin.

A friend sent me a few HOGs recently and Path of Sin: Greed is one of them. It’s always satisfying to finish these but I can’t really remember the last time I genuinely somewhat enjoyed a story behind these.

I was trying to finish a handful of HOGs but after seeing my last few updates and most of my recently added games, I kinda want to play stuff that’s more unique, I think. I miss games like Undertale, Stories Untold, Simulacra, Emily Is Away (+Too), Oxenfree, Orwell, Who Is Mike, Her Story, Pony Island, Solitairica, Loot Hero DX, Plantera, Bad End, Danganronpa… Most of the games I have on my mind to play next are VNs, HOGs and platformers, but none of them feel that “different” to me. I feel like lately it’s harder and harder to find games like that; the next three games all had rather cool concepts that could’ve fit in there, but ultimately fell short for me.

Sorry, James is just… not fun. Was really looking forward to playing this, the aesthetic and the ideas are really cool, but the puzzles get ridiculously hard very quickly and the payoff from the story is just not worth it.

Late Shift seemed pretty great, most of the acting managed to not be cringy, story was quite okay for a game, but I don’t get why they insisted so much on the idea that choices matter if they did not make at least one ending for one of the most obvious overall choices. The whole game is about getting dragged into a robbery, and you can repeatedly choose to try to escape, not comply, try to ruin it, and yet about half way through you’re just about forced by the game to go along with it anyway. Logically, you could literally just leave; I don’t care if that ending would mean getting killed, tortured or imprisoned, walking away and living a normal life, or literally whatever else. Could’ve even been a short playthrough compared to actually going through with it. But the game simply does not allow it. Romance also gets shoved down your throat, even if you don’t interact or if you actually reject this one character, for some reason the character you control still seems to care about them, and I just don’t understand it. Maybe even worst of all, there is no skip feature, so if you want to get other endings, have fun watching the common scenes over and over again, as there are somewhere around 8 different endings. Was thinking about just playing this again with friends someday, but apparently it only works if you stream through Mixer and I guess they would have to type the choices or something? Glad I checked beforehand ‘cause it’s not a 10 minute setup and I’ve given up on trying to figure it out ‘cause I highly doubt any of my friends would be willing to go through the hassle. I guess I was just expecting something closer to systems used by Jackbox Party Packs or Man of Medan… The developers said they cannot implement the skip feature because of how the game was made, but that they’d at least try to do so in their future games.

With The Window Box I simply set myself up for disaster. It’s totally my fault for believing it would be something entirely different - some sort of crazy murder house, where someone dies and everyone’s on edge or something, and the occasional Higurashi-reminescent uneasy moments out of the blue present in the game kinda fed into that. I was expecting something more surreal & dramatic, but instead the story was about something very sad and real - which is completely cool, but I really don’t remember where I got that idea from. Other than the story, I just felt like the little puzzles were a bit tedious and somewhat out of place. You get the illusion of choice, but it doesn’t really change anything, so it just feels like the choices could’ve been left out completely and really just make this pretty much a kinetic novel. Loved the art style, the story was decent, but I think there could’ve been a bit more to it.

Shame pile