JANUARY 2018
Apologies for not having any fancy formatting or images, etc, but I really don’t have the time for that anymore, especially when I suck at doing that sort of code-y stuff and will take forever with just the one game, let alone this many ^^

Due to a couple of personal reasons (I had one of the most horrible weeks in recent memory not that long ago), and also because if everything goes well with my writing projects from now on, I probably won’t have the time to do individual reviews for everything I play anymore. Instead, I’ll be focusing on delivering short paragraph-long impressions about the games I play, most likely just once a month.
Despite being much busier than usual, I was still somehow able to play more games this month than ever before in my entire life, if memory doesn’t fail me. I suppose that all of them are either short or short-ish and there’s also two titles I abandoned midway through and that contributed to the unusual high number of games played.

Flood of Light: Really nice and cutesy looking puzzle game. You collect and move orbs of light around in order to complete each room and there’s also secondary objectives tied to achievements. The learning curve is very subtle and the mechanics evolve at a nice steady pace. There’s a story, but I basically didn’t care about it. To sum it up, if you like puzzle games in general, you’ll probably also like this one.

Seraph: This was a weird one. It’s a twin-stick shooter roguelike platformer (all things I tend to like!), but where you don’t actually aim and just focus on jumping around and dodging. Personally, that fact plus the poor design behind the procedural level generation ended up killing the experience for me. It felt way too repetitive way too quickly. I got bored at one point and didn’t finish it.

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs: I kept holding off on this one because I’m such a huge fan of Dark Descent. But a very dear friend gifted it to me (thank you so much, you know who you are!), so I finally got around to playing it. Overall, it’s a really nice experience with some great set pieces and the moments where the music kicks in are truly fantastic and memorable, but overall I didn’t find the story to be as compelling as in the first Amnesia and it also doesn’t have the same level of tension/psychological horror prevalent throughout the first title– Dark Descent continues to be the ONLY game to this day to have actually made me anxious while playing it.

Killing Floor 2: It was being fun until one day it stopped working and it did’t launch ever again. I tried all the suggested solutions in the forums, but with no luck. As for the gameplay itself, it’s a lot of fun, but I wish the maps were more like in Left 4 Dead where you keep moving forward and have an actual objective to accomplish rather than just waiting for the next wave.

Tiny Echo: Charming, but super short point and click adventure game that I won on steamgifts this month. You go around delivering psychedelic mail to nature spirits (just as you would in real life, really ^^) and the reason why you’re doing this becomes evident as you play. It’s a sweet little game, but not very memorable in the end.

Metro 2033: What a ride! The atmosphere and sense of immersion are some of the best I’ve ever seen in a video game. It is a bit of a shame that the game has quite a few bugs and that the animations and combat don’t hold up incredibly well these days, but it was still an awesome game.

Bottle: One of the worst games I’ve ever played. It lasted about 20-30 minutes, there’s one music track on loop, the environment and landscapes re-use the same assets over and over again and there’s only 6 badly written notes to interact with in the entire game. Avoid at all costs!

Metro: Last Light: It fixes basically everything wrong with Metro 2033 and delivers one of my favourite first-person experiences of all time. Absolutely stellar game! The Redux version also includes all the DLC and a couple of the extra missions are truly memorable, namely the 100% survival horror driven “Spider Lair” episode. Awesome stuff!

Owlboy: I think this game has some of the most beautiful pixel art I’ve ever seen, it’s just so pretty and so much care was put into all the little character animations and expressions. As far as gameplay goes, it’s a very accessible platformer compared to many others I’ve played, which makes sense once you realise that the story is very much aimed at all ages. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a couple of tricky sequences and boss fights, but all in all it’s a narrative driven game that was designed to be enjoyed by all rather than trying to appeal to the hardcore platformer audience.