Wrapping up 2017

Updates became really sparse at the end of the year and there were a lot of reasons. Between house renovations, family visits, the holidays, my health and just life getting in the way of getting much done, I didn’t make as much progress as I would have liked on my backlog. Because of all this, it didn’t seem so feasible to make any updates at all, but going forward even if its only a couple of things for the month I’m going to try to do better in keeping up. I may even want to make a monthly update post just to note that I wasn’t able to complete anything, instead of letting my blog grow stagnant.

Even with less time than usual, I did get some things checked off (with a couple of added honorable mentions), so let’s wrap up the year!

October, November and December Updates:

This list won’t be nearly as long as my typical single monthly list (I really didn’t get anything at all done in November) but as this is a “last quarter” timeframe, its still a fairly sizable chunk of games for me to review, so lets get right into things.

(Also I realized while making this post these games are all casual, low impact games which makes sense as my hands have been bothering me but I didn’t realize this until now, hehe. Maybe I’ll get into some more active gameplay in 2018!)

Glass Masquerade

4 hours playtime

27 of 27 achievements
Black Mirror I

17 hours playtime

no achievements
Narcissu 10th Anniversary Anthology Project

51 hours playtime

no achievements
Nightmares from the Deep 2: The Siren's Call

10 hours playtime

29 of 29 achievements
True Lover's Knot

5 hours playtime

4 of 4 achievements
Hustle Cat

16 hours playtime

12 of 12 achievements
Songs of Araiah: Re-Mastered Edition

5 hours playtime

no achievements
Last Days of Spring Visual Novel

5 hours playtime

9 of 9 achievements
Last Days of Spring 2

7 hours playtime

6 of 7 achievements
Asphyxia

13 hours playtime

8 of 8 achievements
Doki Doki Literature Club

10 hours playtime

no achievements
Tharsis

15 hours playtime

7 of 12 achievements
Armello

18 hours playtime

14 of 50 achievements

Non-Steam Game Mentions:

Exoptable Money [10/16]
Presentable Liberty [10/16]

Um, ★★★★★★★★✰✰ stars?

I played these two little indie “games” together as I was told they do go together and are set in the same universe, and one is an idle game and I have 2 monitors so I figured I’d do them at the same time. Hoo boy, I don’t even know what to say. Both are an experience, together it was experience². Food for thought. I won’t say they were enjoyable from a pure gaming perspective but yikes. I don’t regret the time spent.

Glass Masquerade [10/06]: ★★★★★★★★✰✰ [SG Win]
A really nice short puzzle game that does what it does well, and the graphics and aesthetics are absolutely gorgeous. I enjoyed it a lot.

Black Mirror I [10/22]: ★★★★★★★★★✰
Despite never playing it until it was old school to the point of being a low res pain in the ass, I absolutely loved this game and the story was really engagueing. The main character (actually most people) are really unpleasant and unlikeable to any deep degree but at the same time its perfectly understandable why they are the way they are. This is a rare case where I was constantly muttering about the poor attitude, selfishness and “whatever you get, you deserve” nature of the player character, and it didn’t detract from the game play experience at all. The story here was superb, as was the atmosphere.

~~But he still didn’t actually deserve what he got in the end tbh lol.~~

Nightmares from the Deep 2: The Siren’s Call [10/24]: ★★★★★★★✰✰✰
A continuation of the first game, and a genuine sequal that picked up where the first one left off. Standard artifex mundi fare, high quality production values and a LOT of unexpected Lovecraft references that really amused me. The animations and voice overs could have been better as usual but I had a good time, and the things that weren’t great were not a surprise. No problems with any puzzles or unlocking achievements for once!

Narcissu 10th Anniversary Anthology Project [10/31]: ★★★★★★★★✰✰
This game is supposed to hit you like a truck to the chest and it did several times, without being melodramatic (too much). I found myself hit the hardest by something that was probably meant to be a very small thing, but I think its because it really reminded me of my mother, when one of the ill characters in one of the stories noticed her mother’s hands not being as well manicured like they used to be, because of sacrifices the mother had made in taking care of her sick child. All in all, a wonderful experience but I’m docking a couple of stars here because there were some times it dragged so much I had to just hold on and keep playing. Though there was no story, at all, period, that I regretted playing or felt I wasted my time on once I’d reached the end of the arc.

True Lover’s Knot [12/14]: ★★★★✰✰✰✰✰✰
This was not a great VN but it had potential. I could pick apart almost every facet of this game and find huge faults with it (for example, the characters being uncannily sized wrong and out of proportion with each other, like one girl’s head being almost the size of the guy’s upper body when they are on screen together) but I’d give it a pass on almost all of these things on charm alone if it had been polished just a little more. After all I know the difference between a long, deep VN and a “junk food” cheap VN and I chose this one because I didn’t want something very long and deep at the time. The ending was a let down too, just spending 5 more minutes more on the endings would have made the game so much better, but each route gave about a sentence of conclusion.

Hustle Cat [12/21]: ★★★★★★★✰✰✰
Pretty interesting VN, nice art, nice story, has a lot going for it. But I would have really liked longer endings and one certain plot point being expanded on just a little — even though being open and mysterious is nice in its own way, if there’s no sequel that one thing really should have been made just a little more clear. Great writing and a lot of fun though.

Songs of Araiah [12/24]: ★★★★★✰✰✰✰✰
Mediocre in all ways but I still liked it. The story was fun in the “cheap VN” way. I grabbed it for a few tremor coins and it was a good enough time, but there’s no way in the world this thing is worth the 14.99 actual asking price. If it drops to like 99 cents or so, or is in a bundle, go for it but otherwise stay away. I’m usually completely not objective in my reviews and stick to a liked-it-or-not format but the asking price for the quality and time is an insult to good taste.

Last Days of Spring [12/26]: ★★★★✰✰✰✰✰✰
Made by the same dev as True Lover’s Knot and also more potential than execution but I played it anyway, mostly because see below. Anyway, I didn’t hate it but “cheap” really is the word of the day.

Last Days of Spring 2 [12/27]: ★★★★★★✰✰✰✰
Not amazing but a huge huge improvement. A lot more enjoyable, detailed, better art, better backgrounds, decent writing. Could still improve more and the endings could be a little less vague but the vague works a lot better here in the way its presented. At least there is obvious improvement in the dev’s work.

Asphyxia [12/28]: ★★★★★★★★★✰
Amazing bait and switch, I had no idea what this story was really about but I got suspicious in the first 10 minutes when there were just way too many convenient names and references. I really and truly enjoyed it because despite the entire change in all areas, there was still enough of the historical information bleeding through that I feel like I enjoyed it twice over (and I accidentally got both the obvious girls at boarding school story, and a huge personal historical interest story at the same time!). Unique and obviously not accurate at all but still accurate. -1 star for making my favorite poet an insufferable chore to be around (but that’s probably legit lol). This was my first VN by this author but I enjoyed it so much I picked up some more of her work, though I believe melodrama is her specialty. Also man, the art for this one is really pretty.

Games I’ve Probably Abandoned:

Doki Doki Literature Club[12/31]: ??????????
This is probably a 10 star experience for effort and the bottom line reveals (it seems nothing short of excellent) but now that I’ve gotten to the horror bits, I don’t like the way its affecting me at all. I won’t spoil it but I will say its not the type of horror that feels so detrimental to me, but the methods used. After completing only a small part of the “shit’s just gone south” portion, I felt like I was about to have a seizure (and I don’t even have epilepsy to my knowledge?) but I felt very… disconnected, ungrounded, dizzy and out of sorts and it took a while to wear off. I think the actual graphics and audio are the cause and not the content but its not good either way. I’ll either abandon it, or my curiosity will get the better of me and I’ll play in infrequent, small sessions. This is definitely not something I can do all at once, I know that. Short or not.

Honorable Mentions!:

These are games I’m probably going to keep coming back to, but I will also probably never be able to 100% for various reasons, and I’ve completed the main stories and gameplay so I’ll go ahead and mark them off for the year.

Tharsis [12/31]: ★★★★★★★★✰✰ [SG Win]
Great RNG spaceship disaster sim dice game. But boy its hard and everything blows up. I’ll always come back for a round but beating this on the hardest difficulty is way beyond me for who knows how long. But it is a dice game with random chance events, so basically its a single player “yahtzee, but in hell”, and though “everything’s on fire and I can’t breathe, but cannibalism is a-ok in space” is a nice touch — but if this sort of gameplay is just boring to you, the sci-fi paint job probably won’t change your mind. But I like it, a lot.

Armello [12/31]: ★★★★★★✰✰✰✰ [SG Win]
So very charming. The art is gorgeous, the music is wonderful and the entire thing is like a storybook. Even the story is presented in poetic form and its really great at evoking that whole “magical fantasy world in a far away land” feeling. But there are 2 complaints here and they aren’t small ones. First, while the written format and initial story is great there’s little of it and really, there is no story at all beyond what you are first shown in the intro — so I ended up being invested in something that ultimately wasn’t there. Second, the gameplay is by far the weakest point and that’s not a good thing to say about a game. Its a board game through and through, and so much of the game time is spent waiting for your next turn to come around again. I understand why but it loses my interest more than I wish it did, sometimes. Also being a competitive board game of capture the throne, I understand why it has no story, but it certainly could have, in single player at least. It sets you up for one but the end is literally “you won, congrats!”, which makes sense in that replaying it over and over is the real point, but at least SOME feeling of resolution and depth for each character winning would have really made the experience a lot better, and really encouraged me to win with every available personality, other than “just because” (even a single paragraph would have worked honestly…).