I know I am still a slouch compared to a lot of you folks here, but I have been around for about a month and I have definitely been more diligent about playing and trying my best to finish some games recently. My problem is buying games, I can’t seem to stop buying more games, even though my library is already more than I can hope to finish in 10 lifetimes.

Recently I joined the last Challenge Me that concluded a couple of days ago and spent a decent amount of time on two of the five games suggested to me: Space Run and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. I only beat the former, as I don’t like to replay games too much, unless it’s a game that has captivated me a lot and I want to relive the experience. Space Run was fun though I am not huge in Tower Defense games and this was a bit outside of my comfort zone. I just barely beat the campaign by grinding through all of the bits and getting all of the upgrades, and finally getting lucky on completing all of the quests. I saw some comments about people saying that they blew through the campaign in about 5 hours, it took me more than 17… 🤐 Though I did have fun, so no regrets. As for Hellblade, that was quite an experience, it was powerful and moving, creeping me out in several places. I took my time to walk through the environment mostly instead of running. The story was excellent. It was suggested to me in an aside by a friend a couple of years ago, and I just never got around to it. I am really glad that it was brought to my attention again. I have since purchased the soundtrack and encouraged a few other people to play it. For people who had issues with psychosis and mental health difficulties, it may not be a great title to play through, especially anyone with active struggles, but it’s certainly a very worth title.

On my own, I went back in and completed the Yakuza 0 story and could at least say that I beat the game. I may go back and do some side quests and such, but knowing that it takes more than 200 hours to complete to 100%, I am just not sure if I have the patience to do that. This is an amazing game though, and I certainly may well do this in the future. I think for me, the best part of the game is the story, so I might as well move on to the next part of the story in Yakuza Kiwami since 0 was the first game I played in the series. Now I want all of the rest to be moved to PC so I can experience them all… LOL!

Then after that, I quickly ran through Snakeybus, it only took about 1.5 hours to get to 100% completion. It’s a 3D snake with a bus segment for each segment. The snake gets longer when you pick up passengers by running into them and then delivering them to a specified spot. It was very amusing to play because of the way it is constructed. The snake can jump (got a jetpack or something) and so you make 3D pathways to keep growing without crashing. I got this on sale, so for 75% off, it wasn’t a big deal. I probably would have not wanted to spend the full price on it though.

Escape Lala 2 was on sale at around the same time. I ran through the first game in about 1/2 hour and then bought the second game. There was an issue with too many frames being processed and so I emailed the developers while putting the game on hold. They have since fixed the frames and now my GPU won’t be going crazy, it’s on my list to play very soon. The first game was a very fun pixel P&C puzzle game, and so I am hoping just a bigger and better version in the second game. The first game is free by the way, check it out if you might be interested.

I went through all that there is available in Hollow Island, a new sandbox game that just allows you to do whatever. I am hoping to see more story and quest content in the future with updates. It’s pretty fun but for people who rely on story-driven content in-game, it’s non-existent here. I started by doing some beta-testing and followed through the available content post-launch, mostly to help the developer. Since I mostly rely on story-driven materials in-game to keep engaged.

Amid all of this, a 50% sale for Swords & Souls: Neverseen came to Steam and I couldn’t resist. This game I had kept my eyes on it for quite some time and wanted to play it for myself. I find mindless grinders sometimes get really boring, and this one seem to rely on a few mini-games for grinding that still required a lot of attention. I am more a reflex-driven kind of player instead of deep strategy, so I sunk somewhere north of 17 hours to complete the story and a couple of hours since just to keep grinding away, because there’s an endless mode for the game. I think I will be revisiting this for quite some time on and off. (No Cloud saves either, so going to keep it installed until I know I don’t want anything to do with it any more. XD)

Path of Giants is a brand new puzzler that came out that mesmerized me for a couple of days. It’s a set of well-designed short but elegant logic puzzles in a really cute game design. It doesn’t really bother me that I only got 16/17 achievements, since the last one is for not using Undo function for 12 levels (the whole main-story). I may go back and replay the game another time, but for now, it will just have to sit there while my attention is elsewhere.

Anyway, I am working on a couple of other games at the moment, maybe my next update won’t be so long. But it’s a first for me, and I don’t know how you people make your updates look so fancy, so I am just sticking to plain text here with some links.

The biggest problem for my ever-growing backlog is that I do a lot of game curating and beta testing, to the point that I start a lot of games, give some pointers to developers and then put it down before moving on to the next project. It gets mess at times, so I am constantly trying out new games and trying to break games at the same time, pushing them as far as I can and trying to create bugs to report back. I may also have a job that occupies about 60 hours of my time per week, so I am constantly trying my best to find proper balance to work, play, spend time with family, go the gym, etc. So pardon me if I am not too active and don’t post too many updates.

Thanks for having me as a part of this community!