Finally Posting the Rest of the Games I Finished in 2018

(As it turns out I remembered I actually had a google doc for ease of copypaste so I had a lot of this already written. Whew! :D)

• Stranger of Sword City
  

  224 hours playtime

  44 of 44 achievements

• Where Angels Cry
  

  5 hours playtime

  no achievements

• MatchyGotchy
  

  12 hours playtime

  20 of 20 achievements

• Sickness
  

  20 hours playtime

  10 of 10 achievements

• Let`s not stay friends
  

  8 hours playtime

  14 of 14 achievements

• Higurashi When They Cry Hou - Ch.5 Meakashi
  

  17 hours playtime

  16 of 16 achievements

• Elminage ORIGINAL
  

  134 hours playtime

  no achievements

• CLANNAD
  

  90 hours playtime

  22 of 22 achievements

• Higurashi When They Cry Hou - Ch.6 Tsumihoroboshi
  

  22 hours playtime

  15 of 15 achievements

• The Painscreek Killings
  

  16 hours playtime

  33 of 33 achievements

• Zero Escape: The Nonary Games
  

  76 hours playtime

  38 of 38 achievements

• The Land of Pain
  

  13 hours playtime

  no achievements

• Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened - Remastered
  

  15 hours playtime

  no achievements

• Conarium
  

  19 hours playtime

  26 of 26 achievements

• Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth
  

  16 hours playtime

  no achievements

Stranger of Sword City [07/01]: ★★★★★★★✰✰✰
A great grid based dungeon crawler. It certainly won’t win over anyone who’s not a fan of the genre, but it has some really interesting features like the way class change works, allowing you to develop your characters to fill multiple roles. The most important thing for me in these kind of games, is the ability to use your own images for characters, and this one is one of the best I’ve seen in this capacity, requiring different pictures at different resolutions for various screens in game. Its stylish and fun but the story is a bit lacking, and the plus gameplay sounds great in theory but involves a lot of ridiculously overpowered enemies and boils down to a tedious grind. Turn based RPG grinding is something I usually do not mind at all, but SoSC could have been a bit better in the late game aspect, as there is very little reward for many extended hours of play. I loved it overall but it’s really for fans of the niche and not for those looking to just get into this sort of game, or expect something more than the basic wizardry type format.

Where Angels Cry [07/13]: ★★★★★✰✰✰✰✰
An odd point and click game and not a HOG as it might seem. (The sequel actually is a standard HOG though). There is some object finding involved within some scenes but this is more like getting item A from the screen you’re in, to fulfill task B without any genuine HOG gameplay. Its dated looking but the premise is really interesting and the story is pretty good overall. But it’s known to be glitchy and require restarting if you don’t do certain things in the dev’s expected order. I didn’t have this issue but I backed up my single save often just in case. The ending, I’d call downright sacrilegious and even though I’m not remotely Christian myself, it made me pretty uncomfortable anyway. Still worth a playthrough if you got it in a bundle maybe, but not something I’d highly recommend. It’s also rather short.

Sickness [07/05]: ★★★★★★✰✰✰✰
This is a solid, well written VN and it does everything it claims to on the box. I enjoyed it to a degree. I don’t quite know how to explain why I personally didn’t like it more without a lot of spoilers but basically it was more action based than cerebral. I expected Lynch and got Tarantino. Which is perfectly fine, even a bonus if you prefer Tarantino. It’s dark, edgy and gets into some gory scenes and taboo topics but it’s all handled competently. It just didn’t wow me as much as I’d hoped, but it’s worth reading.

MatchyGotchy [07/29]: ★★★★★✰✰✰✰✰
Bright and colorful little clicker/idle game with a space theme which was why I downloaded it. Its really cute but there is very little to do, and the last achievements really make it overstay what would be a quick fun little game otherwise.

Higurashi When They Cry Hou - Ch. 5 Meakashi [07/30]: ★★★★★★★★★★
I’m not even going to try to explain, unravel or otherwise quantify any Higurashi chapters anymore. I might rant over how stellar it is when its all over. I fully expect to. If this series lets me down I’ll be crushed but I honestly don’t see that happening. The quality of writing, this amazing story and the ranting and raving with my friend over our conspiracy theories that still don’t quite explain it, have made this one of the best things I have ever read, in any medium.

Let’s Not Stay Friends [08/02]: ★★★★★✰✰✰✰✰

It’s a decent otome if you have absolutely nothing better to read, but it unfortunately falls into the “short VN” pitfalls that are so hard to avoid, and since its an otome, that makes those failings even more obvious. Its way too short and shallow for the romances to have any meaning. The world building is really interesting, there’s a lot of cute and colorful art, the dialog is decent, the characters are okay if a little cliche. But being a short VN with 98% of the entire storyline taking place in a single day, it’s just too hard to feel invested in anything that happens. Sometimes a really short experience can be amazing and get the job done in a flash, especially if there is a plot twist. But that’s a really high hurdle to overcome when the story’s focus is love. I’d like to see what this little team could pull off with a longer narrative and might even pick up more of their work in the next sale. Though there is a much bigger potential caveat. The reason that this game is passable at all is because someone with a competent grasp of English kindly volunteered in the forums to make this game feasible and her work is apparent. The character profile screen was obviously not sent to her to review, and its such a mess of gibberish I can’t imagine trying to slog through the whole thing with that level of nonfunctional English. Hopefully the creators can learn from this and make sure to have English editors on staff to finalize future works as well, or it will be a disaster.
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Elminage Original [08/13]: ★★★★★★✰✰✰✰
I actually enjoyed this one but it’s a bit of an oddball. It’s a dungeon crawler/wizardry-like game that in many ways is quite basic, but tries to make up for that with unique customization options, allowing you to control everything from character names, portraits, spell names, and even the in-game soundtrack. As I’m a huge fan of party based dungeon crawlers in general, there was a lot to enjoy here. The enemies are super weird and the odd translations give it a very strange feel and perhaps charm. I love the fact that absolutely every enemy seems to have at least a weapon and armor equipped, so you can steal some hilarious items (with art, stats and everything else) such as a snake’s tail or a dog’s bark. It’s even more interesting when you run into enemies that are particularly weird because monster eq seems to be mostly unique to the specific monster. I found myself wanting to steal everything at least once to see what in the world I got.The main problem here is that the further in you go, the tougher it gets but the incentive to keep moving forward steadily decreases. I was able to to have fun with the entire regular game and the post game dungeon, but the so called super bosses can only be challenged by looping the entire game over and over again, even without great grinding spots.

Honorable mention to my poor bishop for the fear status he’d acquire from failing to ID an item:

“YOU TOUCHED IT!” Classic.

Clannad [09/04]: ★★★★★★★★★✰
A really great VN that made me cry several times. It’s a classic and it’s easy to see why. However, it’s a bit older now and maybe not the definitive masterpiece it once was, as there is a lot more competition for that title now than at it’s release, but it really touched me. It’s absolutely a slice of life story through and through, and at a hefty expected 60-100 hours for full completion, it’s definitely not for someone who needs more unusual exciting situations for a story to keep their attention. To describe it as briefly as possible, Clannad comes down to a narrative exploring the many different definitions of the concepts of both “love” and “family”. It’s a tearjerker at times for sure, but it never feels exploitive in that goal, or that it’s reaching too hard in order to be sad for sadness’s sake. All of the melodrama even in its most excessive, is believable. I docked a star because I found some characters incredibly unlikable (and not in the “this is supposed to be a villain or antagonist” way) we’re supposed to fall in love with and overlook violent, hateful personalities – I’m assuming for the sake of fulfilling a trope – and some distastefully written content that seemed to serve no purpose and would have been best left out.

Higurashi When They Cry Hou - Ch.6 Tsumihoroboshi [10/08]: ★★★★★★★★★★
Another Higurashi, another triumph I couldn’t explain without a 10 hour monologue to try to somehow relegate how we even got here in the first place.

The Painscreek Killings [10/18]: ★★★★★★★★✰✰
A really fun murder mystery adventure game that is at its core, a walking sim. You’re examining a cold case in a small town that now lies abandoned. What made it really fun for me was all the clues and items found along the way, and how much solving the mystery yourself is baked in as part of the experience.

Zero Escape: The Nonary Games [10/20]:★★★★★★★★★★
Two absolutely amazing VNs in a single package. I loved both of these to bits. Clever, mystifying and unique. Its hard to say much without spoiling the whole ride but imagine if the Saw movies were about quantum mechanics, and Jigsaw was a talking rabbit.

The Land of Pain [10/21]: ★★★★★★★★✰✰
A very creepy, slow burn sort of horror walking sim. Its very Lovecraftian in its delivery with a vague, pervading sense of dread. Its a small indie game and is only a few hours long, but incredible for what it is.

Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened [10/23]: ★★★★★★★★✰✰
Sherlock and Watson. Classic blokes. Classic mystery solving. …Except its not elementary, its a Cthulhu cult. A strange mash-up but it totally works here.

Conarium [10/30]: ★★★★★★★★✰✰
If you’re still reading, can you see that I decided to play everything in my backlog on a certain theme, that i could get my grubby little fingers on? ITS LOVECRAFTIAN HORROR! This time in an adventure style game. The atmosphere and tension are so thick you could cut it with a knife, and the story is great. Its meant as a direct continuation of an actual story written by Lovecraft and I think they did a really good job with the plot. It seems like a plausible direction to take, and the writing is enjoyable.

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth [10/29]: ★★★★★✰✰✰✰✰
Its Lovecraftian. Its really Lovecraftian. And it doesn’t reference just our man octopus man himself. Its a great story, a wonderful game and a worthy homage to the lore. The lackluster rating is because this was one of the most frustrating gaming experiences of my life because of bugs, freezes, crashes, glitches and an entire slew of issues that really tarnished the experience. Honestly, if I wasn’t such a fan of this mythos and starved for more takes on it, I probably would have given up, which is a shame. Polishing and patching would have made this an easy 8 to 9 for me probably but as it stands a 5 is almost too generous considering how many times I had to wait for the world’s slowest loading screens as the game ate my evenings by chaincrashing.