Mid June Report

Summer’s here! And with it all the free time one could ask for his backlog assassination!
Had a mild case of LastM-itis(:P) these past 2 weeks, causing me to tackle quite the number of titles.

The constants:

• Armello
  

  105 hours playtime

  38 of 50 achievements

• Borderlands 2
  

  32 hours playtime

  20 of 69 achievements

Have cut down quite a bit on Armello. There was a double drop weekend though so played a lot then.
As for Borderlands 2 as I said on my last post this is a co-op run so not much done this half month. My friend we play with got a new job so he’s pretty busy with that but we still manage to steal a couple hours every now and then for it.
And the one that can’t have it’s own neat box, Fire Emblem Heroes, has been taking up a bit of time lately. There’s an event ongoing I’m greatly enjoying and needs a loooot of grinding so.. :3

The HOGs:

• Clockwork Tales: Of Glass and Ink
  

  6 hours playtime

  11 of 19 achievements

• Queen's Quest: Tower of Darkness
  

  6 hours playtime

  0 of 22 achievements

• Enigmatis: The Ghosts of Maple Creek
  

  5 hours playtime

  6 of 11 achievements

• Enigmatis 2: The Mists of Ravenwood
  

  7 hours playtime

  27 of 36 achievements

• Enigmatis 3: The Shadow of Karkhala
  

  3 hours playtime

  25 of 34 achievements

• Nightmares from the Deep: The Cursed Heart
  

  7 hours playtime

  9 of 15 achievements

• Nightmares from the Deep 2: The Siren's Call
  

  3 hours playtime

  22 of 29 achievements

The monthly theme game me the incentive I needed to tackle the HOGs I had won on SG a long time ago and never played. I was never a fan of the genre and finally trying my hand on some titles I can safely say that hasn’t changed. But at least now I can say I tried :P

Most of them were okay-ish so won’t take them one by one but instead only mention the best and worst. The one that managed to pull me in the most and did the best job in telling a compelling story, with interesting characters and decent scenes was Enigmatis 2: The Mists of Ravenwood. Sure enigmatis 3 is newer and more polished but I never once felt any connection towards Fang, she was merely there, making most of the game feel flat. Ravenwood on the other hand made me connect not only with it’s main characters but even with secondary ones like the Lady Clerk.
As for the worst there’s no doubt in my mind that this is Queen’s Quest: Tower of Darkness. A misplaced royal couple that looks like they were pulled out of Beverly Hills and thrown into a fantasy novel, a mediocre to bad story, totally non sense points(e.g. wizard has captured a fairy, put her in a cage, brought her to you as a gift, and she’s totally fine with it. In fact she’s so okay with it that the second you open the cage she announces she’s your baby’s fairy godmother and will help you. Like WTF?! Why were you in a birdcage then?), scenes and puzzles that can be solved with your eyes closed and absolutely no point in anything. And if that was not enough it bugged out and didn’t register my progress. I had even collected all the collectibles but when I closed the game and went back to Steam I noticed no achievement had unlocked even though they did in game. So I loaded it back up to get a screenshot of the in game page and what do you know? It asks me to name my profile like I never had opened it before. Everything’s erased… So yeah, f*ck me (-_-)

The rest:

• Octave
  

  4 hours playtime

  no achievements

• Beastiarium
  

  5 hours playtime

  no achievements

• Access Denied
  

  4 hours playtime

  7 of 7 achievements

• Beholder
  

  14 hours playtime

  13 of 60 achievements

• Press X to Not Die
  

  2 hours playtime

  6 of 11 achievements

• ABZU
  

  5 hours playtime

  3 of 12 achievements

• Swordbreaker The Game
  

  3 hours playtime

  27 of 67 achievements

• Overfall
  

  4 hours playtime

  5 of 50 achievements

• LiEat
  

  8 hours playtime

  20 of 30 achievements

• Watchmen: The End Is Nigh
  

  83 minutes playtime

  no achievements

• Human Resource Machine
  

  68 minutes playtime

  3 of 16 achievements

Octave:Was gifted this game(Thanks Xelco! <3) so I decided to boot it up. Unfortunately it wasn’t what I expected. I had something closer to “The Lady” in mind than what I got. To be honest I have absolutely no idea what was happening. You’re brought to a forest/swamp to be killed by someone but he ends up killed by some horror lady-thing. Then you just walk around lighting stuff and solving puzzles while avoiding some alien looking monsters and ghosts until you die, somehow enter the afterlife I guess, or some monster realm, and beat the horror lady who saved you but now is trying to kill you(eh? why?). Generally WTF went down? xD
Beastiarium: Looked interesting so I entered some gibs for this. Lucky for me I won one. Unfortunately this is another game that disappoints. The visuals look good and you keep getting Bioshock vibes but that’s all the game has going for it. Bad puzzles, no coherent threats, uninteresting plot. Avoid.
Access Denied: Poor man’s The Room. It includes 30something puzzle boxes that can be finished in 10 secs each. However it suffers from the same thing the puzzle section on SG does, and the reason I dislike it so much(SG, not the game, the game was okay). Apparently part of the puzzle is figuring out wtf you’re supposed to do. Absolutely no instructions on what is being asked of you.
Beholder:I’m quite torn on this one. Although it’s a nice idea and the execution is nice it has a couple very major problems. First there’s times where you get tenants that don’t initiate any storyline but turns out they’re part of someone else’s yet you get them first so there’s a few times where to empty an apartment you get someone arrested but turns out you need them later. But that’s minor. The MAJOR problem is the lack of manual saves. Or at least multiple “checkpoints”. I had to restart my playthrough 3 times because I was screwed by the autosaves. They happened mere moments before a game-terminating event. Once I would load my game and like 2 seconds later a bomb would go off. Another I’d load up and a couple minutes later the police would come arrest me for something that happened before so no way to fix it either. Etc. So yeah, lots of frustration which could be easily avoided by the simple thing of being able to load a previous save.
Press X to not Die: Bad. Very bad. So bad it actually turns great! It’s sooooo much fun! The story is bollocks, the acting is awful, the special effects ridiculous… However when all of this bad comes together it becomes a great game :P
Abzu: I don’t think there’s anything to say that hasn’t already been said in the numerous posts about this one. Absolutely stunning environments, great relaxation value, amazing getaway. I’m not a fan of it’s controls but that’s quite minor.
Swordbreaker: Meh. Love CYOA games when done right but this is not one of those. The story is mediocre to bad, the translation bad at times and you get a feeling the game “autocorrects” your path cause 90% of the time you’ll find yourself at the same parts. At least the artwork is okay.
Overfall: My latest impulse buy. Turns out it was a good choice! It’s an interesting mix of rogue-lite, resource management and strategy rpg. It requires multiple playthroughs to be really completed but don’t wanna get stuck on one game too long now so I’ve marked beaten since I beat it once and will come back for more in the future. Oh! And be warned it barely explains anything(no tutorial etc) so it requires quite a bit of trial and error. Also includes a “Story Builder” where you can design your own random events/questlines and share them with everyone else if you want. My only complaint would be the battles feel a bit slow. If we could turn up their speed to like x2 or x4 that’d be awesome!
LiEat: Loved this one. It’s a rather short RPGMaker game, split into 3 chapters, roughly an hour each. They all play in the same way. Your two MCs arrive at a new location, investigate by questioning the others and fighting their lies(which are given form with Efi’s power) and confront a boss. The world everything is happening in, draws you in, the other characters are all rather charming and memorable and generally this is one game that makes you wish for more.
Watchmen: The End is Nigh: Still only at Chapter IV(out of 7) but meeeeeeeh. So far it’s just following corridors with different scenery and using the same combos on hordes of the same two enemies(dressed differently) over and over and over, time after time after time in each chapter, every chapter. There’s a small comic-styled at the end and beginning of each chapter and some banter between Nite Owl and Rorschach and that’s everything. Meh.
Human Resource Machine: Nope, not happening. It just isn’t. I should have guessed by the screenshots alone but this is Assembly. Absolutely hated Assembly when I studied it in my university, and I still do hate it so a game based on low-level programming is something very not enjoyable to me. If however you have no knowledge of low-level programming(low-level not as easy, but as programming languages closer to machine language like Assembly) then it’s a nice game to introduce you to the logic behind those languages. But if you already know Assembly just stay away. It’ll pose absolutely no challenge.

So that’s been my June so far. Tbh I feel a little burnt out so I don’t think I’ll game much more this week and next week is the Summer Sale so… yay! ;-;
Cheerio assassins, XOXO