• Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter
  

  15 hours playtime

  25 of 25 achievements

• Virginia
  

  5 hours playtime

  17 of 17 achievements

• Transistor
  

  5 hours playtime

  12 of 33 achievements

• Orwell
  

  12 hours playtime

  0 of 27 achievements

• Brushwood Buddies
  

  10 hours playtime

  8 of 13 achievements

• Hidden Folks
  

  6 hours playtime

  5 of 5 achievements

• Under Leaves
  

  3 hours playtime

  21 of 21 achievements

• Lion Quest
  

  3 hours playtime

  10 of 46 achievements

• Parkitect
  

  7 hours playtime

  0 of 1 achievements

• The Walking Dead
  

  11 hours playtime

  24 of 48 achievements

I haven’t written an update in a few months, so I’m probably missing a few games, but here’s what I thought …

Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Daughter (buy) - Interesting mix of QTEs, stealth, puzzles and just a story. There were different cases, some directly from the books, I believe (at least one short one I definitely remembered), and in between an overarching story was told. Some of the tasks were pretty annoying, but you can skip almost all of them (I don’t like stealth, probably took me over an hour to clear those 2 short passages for my last missing achievement). Overall I did enjoy the game, although I wasn’t that impressed with the graphics (for the original asking price I would have expected fewer repeated assets for the streets outside, and maybe some more random conversations to listen in on when passing people). I also felt that for some deductions you really could only guess and hope for the best, and you couldn’t take it back and were then stuck with inaccurate character profiles. (Luckily there’s no achievement for that)

Virginia (gift) - Super weird game. Your choices don’t influence the story, only a little bit of how much you see of this world, but I enjoyed the game a lot. The cinematic score fit really well, since it was pretty much like a movie.

Transistor (SG win) - Loved the graphics. Liked the music. Hated the gamplay. After playing Bastion, I expected this to be even better (everyone said it was), but I didn’t like the overheating or whatever in the fights, had to change tactics after almost every big fight :/ The boss fight was interesting though and I liked what I got from the story.

Orwell (gift) - I really enjoyed the story and some of the questions the game raised, but some of the decisions/results of decisions seemed a bit misleading (e.g. I uploaded info about 2 people having broken up or something else that clearly indicated they were a couple at some point, and days later, after new information, the supervisor was surprised that they were a couple - in every playthrough, no matter which bits of information I uploaded). (not sure why this shows 0/27 cheevos, I got them all …)

Brushwood Buddies (SG win) - Good puzzle + strategy game. Reminiscent of Doodle God, but here combinations actually made sense (for the most part). I managed to run into a game-breaking bug towards the end (an elevator disappeared and I couldn’t change the floor anymore), but I posted in the Steam forums and the dev helped me right away and sent me a fixed savefile. In the final level I managed to do it again, and he helped me again! (apparently I’m the only one who managed to do that, and even twice! - I knew why it happened after the first time, but the final level adds some pressure with disappearing objects, so I panicked and it happened again).

Hidden Folks (summer sale buy) - Super cute HOG with loads to discover besides just the stuff you have to find. It mixes in a few puzzle mechanics, which ramps up the level of difficulty quite a bit. But every item also has a cute description with some sort of hint, so it’s not too hard. After the first few levels I expected only about 3 h or total playtime, but the factory level the added was a lot bigger than previous levels and I needed about 5 hours in the end (I accidentally idled the game for about 40 minutes, blacklisting apparently means nothing to Idle Master ^^”). I heard they might add more levels to the game, looking forward to those :)

Under Leaves (summer sale buy) - Another super cute HOG, but in a completely different style. Here everything is pretty much in plain sight, but difficult to find because of the monochromatic images. I had to start over a few times because I just couldn’t find the last item in an early scene but wanted to get the achievement for playing with no hints. I finally got a good distribution the third time around :) (object placements change every time you play a scene, so a gameplay video only offers limited help).

Lion Quest (buy) - Yes, I love cute games! :D This is a zen platformer I’m really enjoying so far. I treid streaming it on twitch for a bit, but my internet connection is really shitty and also I’m not into commentary, so it’s pretty boring to watch I guess.

Parkitect (SG win) - It’s still in EA, so there’s not that much to do. There’s also no tutorial, so I have yet to figure out how to properly build a rollercoaster and why my transport tube thingies didn’t work. I just pieced some random rides and shops together to make a park, change prices and hired people and then watched my income go down :( No idea how to make it profitable yet. But it’s actively being developed, with regular updates every week, so I’m confident that it’ll be really enjoyable once it’s properly released. (I could probably also just search the internet … but I have games to play!)

The Walking Dead (buy) - Got challenged to play this for PoP7. I also got challenged to play Limbo, but it got really boring really fast, so I abandoned it (sorry people who loved Limbo!). This one I like so far. I’ve never read the comics or watched the series (I saw one episode, but I think it was one of those character background ones, and I didn’t know any of the characters, so it was pretty boring to me). As with all choice-based games, I’m not always 100% happy with the choices I’m offered, or the result is not what I intended (e.g. different tone than what I had in mind when I chose it), but overall this offers a good range of choices and you can even just say nothing. I’m about halfway through and hope I can finish it by next week. (And then focus on my theme game, which actually got chosen for me in the last PoP event I participated in, and is the only chosen game I couldn’t even start then.)

I also bought a few things during the summer sale, but only 6 new games (2 of which I’ve already completed!). I also got some soundtracks (really getting into game soundtracks lately, need to check my Humble library, should have a whole bunch of them there!) and some anime shows (time to dust off my Japanese, hopefully I haven’t forgotten everything yet XD).