May 2024

Finished games:

• Islets
  

  8 hours playtime

  40 of 44 achievements

• Umurangi Generation
  

  6 hours playtime

  16 of 23 achievements

• RESTLESS SOUL
  

  6 hours playtime

  30 of 30 achievements

• Mad Experiments: Escape Room
  

  70 minutes playtime

  10 of 13 achievements

• Skábma™ - Snowfall
  

  6 hours playtime

  15 of 33 achievements

• Cleo - a pirate's tale
  

  4 hours playtime

  17 of 24 achievements

• Tinykin
  

  10 hours playtime

  35 of 43 achievements

• CRYPTARK
  

  5 hours playtime

  5 of 27 achievements

New games:

• The Bookwalker
  

  2 hours playtime

  10 of 37 achievements

Quick thoughts:

Islets!

8/10

Classic metroidvania with nice graphic and some fun mechanics, with three independs ways to advance your character (classic metroidvania items, collectables that boost your stats, and money to buy ekstra abilities in shop). Not very difficult, some bosses needed 2 or 3 attempts to beat, but I wasn’t stuck at any moment. Nothing groundbreaking, but it’s a well made game, if you like a genre you should be happy.

Umurangi Generation

5/10

Photographic game in dystopian future. Basically you need to find and photo all stuff on the list. Nice art and world building, but I didn’t like it. Controls are junky, detection of stuff yoe need to catch is sometimes weird, and there are additional goals on every map, which basically demand you to memorise every place of every important item, because you need to simultaniously find all collectables, make every photo and finish in specific time frame. All in all, I didn’t really like it.

RESTLESS SOUL

6/10

A game in afterlife, about a soul who want to go back to life. Half walking sim, half basic twinstick shooter, half very light puzzle game (why EVERYONE in industry freaking love sokoban so much…). It’s heavy relying on it’s humor, and forth wall breaking. If you like it’s kind of humor, you will love it. For me - I was rolling my eyes more than I was laughting. But it’s well made, just not for me.

Mad Experiments: Escape Room

4/10

Escape the room game, made to emulate felling of real world escape rooms, with possibility of coop. Junky, weird, short, with very badly told story (there are three rooms, and to told story properly, you should swap places of room 2 and 3). Maybe with friends its better, but as a solo experience, I didn’t like it.

Skábma™ - Snowfall

6/10

King of action adventure game, with light metroidvania mechanics, about Sámi peoples - Indigenous peoples who live in north part of Scandinavia. I like the topic of the game, and the atmosphere. I really don’t like that they tried to put metroidvania and open world mechanics into linear game - there are a lot of collectables (which are fun to find, because they are talking about Sami culture), but you need to be in specific place at specific time to be able to catch them. For example - you need to go to this particular cave between chapter 3 and 4, because before that you don’t have certain abilities, and after that you wont be able to go to this part of a map. So to all collectibles hunters like me, it’s very irritating. Also, can we stop with cliffhanger endings - especially in indie games, when we don’t know, if there will be budget for second part?

Cleo - a pirate's tale

8/10

Looks a bit like Zelda type game, but it’s a 100% classic adventure game, and a good one! I liked a theme, riddles are good (i needed to check guide 3 times, but mostly because I’m blind as a bat and I didn’t notice, that I can pick up an item). Achievements are a bit tedious, but apart of that - great little point and click.

Tinykin

9/10

AWESOME collectathon game in which you need to go around couple of big maps and find enough of collectables, using abilities of your minion creatures. It’s very, very easy, if you don’t go for 100% (and if you do - main challenge is simply to find everything - there are not many advance puzzles), but the world is imaginative, the movement is fluid, maps are very well made, and its just a joy to run around and collecting couple of hundreds of stuff on every map. I missed this genre so much…

CRYPTARK

6/10

Ok, so this is a roguelike, so you are expected to run it multiple times with different builds, but I finished main campaign, and I don’t need to play it again. It’s a twin stick shooter in space, you are hired to catch abandoned spaceships, to do this, you need to go inside and turn off their power, but there are multiple optional objectives, which will give you additional money. The more money you have, the better gear you can buy, but better gear mean less profit… so it is nice “push-pull” mechanic - do I want more health and better weapon, or should I risk it, and go with basic stuff, but keep more money. I liked it, I didn’t love it, but it was ok. Also - don’t play it on keyboard - I tried, then I jumped onto steamdeck, and this is perfect game for steamdeck.