Mid-Month Update: January!

It’s been a very productive first two weeks of the year … in terms of beating games at least. Already done with 3 games from my ABC Challenge as well as 5 others! If you have any questions about any of the below games, please just ask in the comments! (UPDATE: Also I’ll be trying to do one of these updates about every 2 weeks!)

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ABC Challenge

• 1953 - KGB Unleashed
  

  2 hours playtime

  no achievements

• Amnesia: The Dark Descent
  

  13 hours playtime

  11 of 17 achievements

• Bulletstorm
  

  6 hours playtime

  no achievements

1953 - KGB Unleashed

An okay point-and-click adventure that takes place in an abandoned Cold War Russian bunker where some shady experiments were taking place (because of course they were). You are there for some reason and some sort of story goes on around you, I didn’t find the story all that interesting and at a few major points it made no sense whatsoever to me. A redeeming part of the storytelling is that there is plenty of collectible documents to read with varying degrees of interesting content, though I personally got bored with a lot of them just due to how technically they were written (in that some felt like actual boring military documents). As for the gameplay, I thought some of the puzzles were very clever if a bit vague as to what you were actually supposed to be doing. My biggest gripe about the gameplay is that some of the necessary items feel a little too hard to spot/find.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent

A really atmospheric horror game set in the good olde days! You are Daniel, you have amnesia (big surprise there), and you have an evil spooky thing chasing after you. I really liked this game and the story that you slowly uncover throughout, the character of Daniel feels decently realistic with his reactions to the events that are going on around him and his prior actions that you uncover through diary entries given the situation he was in. The atmosphere in the game is very well done and the creators seemed to have a knack to make safe places feel unsafe. Despite this, the game wasn’t all that scary for me. The AI was very easy to figure out and the scripted events eventually became predictable which quickly turned the horror into more of an inconvenience than anything else. As for the extra content, the short stories in Remember were interesting and helped add to the story and Justine was scarier for me than the base game and had a lot of good ideas, it’s just a shame that it was so short.

Bulletstorm

I’m not a huge shooter fan, generally takes a very specific mood for me to feel like playing one (or a fun multiplayer component), so my opinion of Bulletstorm may be a bit biased. The game definitely has some very creative ideas for a shooter with it’s skill kill system. The time between each new gun feels near perfect in that you seem to get one as soon as you start to get tired of the ones you already have, it’s just unfortunate that the guns that should be the most fun to play with are so useless whether because of very limited ammo or too little damage. The story is passable, predictable, and about what you would expect once it starts to get going. The characters are witty and sometimes funny but can be grating at times and are generally one-dimensional.

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Other Games

• Candle
  

  10 hours playtime

  16 of 23 achievements

• Leaving Lyndow
  

  3 hours playtime

  7 of 7 achievements

• Hexcells Plus
  

  14 hours playtime

  6 of 6 achievements

• Hexcells Infinite
  

  12 hours playtime

  6 of 7 achievements

• Clustertruck
  

  3 hours playtime

  14 of 19 achievements

Candle

A beautiful looking adventure game that definitely deserves the awards it got for its visuals. The gameplay is mostly similar to point-and-click games with slight platforming elements. What you need to do to progress is usually straightforward but quickly becomes aggravating when it isn’t. But the story is still cute and the world is full of character and appealing artwork and was just an overall enjoyable experience.

Leaving Lyndow

A very short walking simulator with nice visuals about a girl who has to say goodbye as she leaves her home to explore the world. The main focus is on the leaving part as is in the title, but due to its short length there really isn’t much to talk about without spoiling most of the game.

Hexcells Plus and Hexcells Infinite

I honestly loved the trilogy of Hexcells games. To me they were just very engrossing and gave my brain quite the exercise as I tried to logic through the puzzles without having to resort to guessing. For me it was possible with the majority of the puzzles, but there were a few here and there that felt impossible to do without taking some guesses.

Clustertruck

A quirky little speed platformer RNG simulator! Incredibly fun and incredibly frustrating at times due to the semi-random nature of the trucks that you have to jump upon. The levels and worlds are different enough that you don’t feel like you’re doing the same thing each time and most of the abilities are fun to use. My only issues with the game is that most of the more expensive abilities feel useless when compared to some of the cheaper ones and that sometimes a level can be impossible just because of the RNG in the driving and physics of the trucks.