October 2024 Progress Report
Just three games this month! I tried to at least beat Coral Island, but I have 92 hours into it and I have a nagging suspicion I’m only halfway through. The Cub was a cute little game I picked up in a bundle, It was pretty fun aside from the few weird platforming sections and the ending was pretty surprising in a fun way. To The Rescue almost made the headliner title, but it’s pretty buggy despite being perfectly enjoyable and weirdly addicting. I loved all the dog breeds and that your hired NPC employees were competent and could handle the tasks you assigned to them, and that fully vaccinating a dog made them more adoptable - as it would in real life. For Fatal Twelve, it started out good, midway was excellent, and the ending kinda flopped for me as it was very “friendship is magic”, over-explaining things with a weirdly placed info dump. I’m pretty sure the original plan was to have two romanceable characters that was cut out to be just one because there was a pink hair girl who was seriously too involved in the story but had no effect on it - if she got removed nothing would have changed. Still a good VN, but, weird.
Next month.. November. I wanna play The Witcher 3, but I’m more behind on Coral Island than I anticipated so I’m not really sure what to do here. I might buy a short-medium game but I think it’s just gonna be farming for me, folks. Also, has anyone seen my little emote cat? They appear to be missing…
Total games added to backlog: 2
Total completed: 3
Shishimai Rinka is a second-year student at a girl's private high school who was caught up in a terrorist bombing on her way back home. She died, and woke up again safe in bed, her death undone. Chosen by the Goddess Parca in a twisted Divine Selection, Rinka and eleven others who died at the same time must discover three vital pieces of information on other victims to eliminate them – their names, what killed them, and their regrets. Only the winner can continue living, the eliminated participants following their original fates, but Rinka isn’t alone. Her friend Miharu is trapped with her.
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15-18+ hours to complete, Fatal Twelve is an LGBTQ+ Yuri visual novel where choices matter. There are seven endings in total with one love interest and 56 unique CGs. Relatively high-quality graphics and voice acting, with little to no spelling errors. Overall, it’s a good VN that’s easy to recommend. I only have two minor complaints – there are a lot of characters and side characters, and a few could have been removed without impacting the storyline. The true end drags on with too much info dumping and hand-wavey magic which kinda killed the emotional impact the story was building.
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The Cub
In a society that’s solved world hunger and death, a new terrifying ecological disaster approaches and the best solution is to bring humanity to Mars. With civilization able to be sustained and reusable rockets built, they left Earth with a portion of the population and the ultra-rich with promises to come back to pick up the rest of humanity only to never return. Abandoned and left on a mutating planet, fighting broke out with others evacuating to safer cities. During the evacuation, a child was separated from his mother, and fearing the gunfire, fled into the forest to be raised by wolves. Decades passed, most of humanity failed to adapt, and the Martians can be seen returning to Earth to see if it’s habitable again… but mostly, to play Golf.
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3 hours to complete, The Cub is a post-apocalyptic puzzle platformer with catchy radio music. There are three games so far that take place in chronological order that can be played separately – Golf Club Nostalgia, The Cub, and Highwater. While the platforming is a bit clunky, the game is pretty solid and worth playing if you enjoy storylines about surviving the aftermath of a collapsed society, no zombies. Not difficult to complete with easy collectibles and chapter-select for quick backtracking, I recommend playing The Cub if you want a short, chill, linear game to spend a couple of hours in.
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To The Rescue!
Moving back home to the bustling town of Yawning Falls, a lost dog shows up in your front yard, and finding their owner sends you on a new career path you never could have imagined. With the assistance of friends, employees, grants, and the funding and approval of the mayor herself, build the greatest and most highly rated animal shelter the city has ever seen! ᓚᘏᗢ
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7+ hours to complete, To The Rescue! is an Endless shelter management sim where you name and build your own Dog shelter, room by room. Hire employees, delegate tasks, and do your best to help dogs be healthy, bathed, and well-vaccinated to find their forever home! While sometimes buggy, there are still frequent updates since its release in 2021.
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Overall, I found it pretty fun and time-consuming, as there is always something to do especially if you focus a lot on expansion. The employees you hire are competent and do their jobs well with little to no micromanagement on your part. There are a bunch of random events! You get super old, injured, or disabled dogs, litters of puppies, and disease outbreaks making your day-to-day different and unexpected. Aside from the game itself, I loved all the menu options and accessibility settings, making minigames and the game as easy or as difficult as you want it to be.
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I also thought The Cub was pretty decent. I’m going to play their next game, Highwater, pretty soon. I like how each of their games is loosely a sequel, but also its own standalone game.
Seriously, I don’t mind sequels but I don’t wanna play a golfing game, and It’s nice that you don’t need to paly it to understand The Cub. I might pick up Highwater if I see it!