August 2024

• Headlander
  

  9.0 hours playtime

  31 of 31 achievements

  

• Midnight Fight Express
  

  6.3 hours playtime

  14 of 40 achievements

  

• SteamWorld Dig
  

  11.9 hours playtime

  14 of 24 achievements

  

• The Forgotten City
  

  7.8 hours playtime

  28 of 40 achievements

  

• The Spectrum Retreat
  

  5.7 hours playtime

  14 of 15 achievements

  

• TOEM
  

  7.7 hours playtime

  48 of 48 achievements

  

• STAR WARS Jedi: Survivor
  

  72.9 hours playtime

  37 of 53 achievements

  GAME
  PASS

• Headlander: A weird highly original metroidvania whose gameplay is not too difficult. On the other hand, as much as it innovates in the genre, the actual gameplay feels missing something in the area of fun that I can’t quite put my finger on.
• Midnight Fight Express: Orthoview beat-em-up with a fair amount of variety and depth available. Worth a play, might be worth beating, probably not worth completing unless you really love this style of game and the challenge.
• Steamworld Dig: Digger/metroidvania I’d previously long left incomplete, but restarted after enjoying SWD2 last month. Ok, but nowhere near as good as its sequel.
• The Forgotten City: Interesting timeloop adventure with some action-y bits (Jumping is awkward but very rarely needed) — definitely worth playing.
• The Spectrum Retreat: Part liminal adventure game, part post-Portal puzzler. I liked the latter more than the former, even though it is somewhat unkind with the potential for softlocks. Even less kind for the completionists is that the last achievement requires another full playthrough for a couple of minutes of different ending (savescumming won’t work).
• TOEM: Charming puzzle adventure based significantly on taking photos, though occasionally lacking reminders/signposting (can be a bit obscure when picking it up after a while).
• STAR WARS Jedi: Survivor: Soulslike/Metroidvania - good combat, pretty good level design (better than the previous game). The downside is the amount of grind in the collectables which should ideally be limited and each individually require some level of skill to get and be meaningful — this is true only of a certain percentage of them. Played on grandmaster with the exception of the final boss which I eventually bumped down to hard. Then I tried NG+, and that is really a step up in encounter difficulty even on easy — a lot closer to a true grandmaster difficulty for regular encounters.