Batch 29 finished!

Beaten: 1-Feb-2020

Click the "Steam Review" link above!

Beaten: Acts I-IV -- 9-Apr-2019, Act V -- 2-Feb-2020

The final chapter is out. The game is complete.

Kentucky Route Zero is pure interactive fiction told through it's scenery and text dialogue -- a visual novel in the truest sense.

No mini-games, puzzles or multiple endings, just a point-and-click system to move around, choose dialog, a great minimalist art style, and a story to tell that's a cross between a road trip and a stream-of-consciousness poem. Like most stories, you'll either get it and be drawn in, or it won't appeal to you and you might think it's a waste of time. KRZ is not for everyone. But if the idea of a slow-simmer plot that wanders through backwoods America dotted with magical realism and dreamy overtones of how "normal" people are not so much, you might want to give it a try.

You start the game with Conroy, an older man in a truck trying to deliver antiques to an address he can't find in rural Kentucky. As he tries to gather information about where he needs to go to finish the job, he is pointed in the direction of "the Zero" by an old man at a gas station and a young woman, Weaver Márquez, who may or may not be dead. The Zero is a mysterious road winding through the caves beneath Kentucky. He's eventually joined by new characters that become a loose group of traveling companions. As the narrative focus flows between them, either directly or by filling in the blanks with your own choices, you are treated to some sublime and often strange encounters and mini-tales along the way.

I enjoyed the game. It's a welcome change of pace that doesn't really have an equal among other story-driven video game titles. Most visual novels feature simply animated characters imposed over static background locales. KYZ presents fluid, navigable locales that surprise in how striking they look not just as tableaus but as slow-moving pieces of art.

Some might not call this a game, but that's OK. It's doesn't exactly pretend to be one. It simply asks your permission to experience and hopefully enjoy.

Beaten: 14-Feb-2020

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Beaten: 27-Feb-2020

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I also created my first ever guide for getting achievements for a Steam game. Find it here.

Beaten: 16-Feb-2020

Gave it a thumbs down! Click the "Steam Review" link.

Beaten: 24-Feb-2020

This is a strategy board game that riffs on RPG-style combat being reduced to simpler chess-like rules. It works and it's entertaining, but I found the draw wearing off fairly quickly.

During each match you play three boards. The goal is to knock out the enemy pieces marked as captains in a set number of rounds per board. These can be any piece type. Once they are eliminated the next board is set up. On your side you have a variety of 2-4 pieces per board that can attack directly, at a distance, move other pieces around, and allow a single piece to take more than one turn.

As you move up in difficulty level you unlock new pieces with new abilities while confronting new enemies or more difficult boards to win.

This game will appeal to people who enjoy short, strategic challenges. It's an amusing time killer.

Beaten: 8-Mar-2020

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Beaten: 4-Jan-2020

I picked up Plague Inc shortly after Thanksgiving and played it mostly in the gap leading up to Christmas. Then in mid-January the COVID-19 outbreak happened in China. It was a bit chilling reflecting on the game's model for enabling the spread of a world-wide pandemic while seeing coronavirus news popping up. I gotta hand it to the game maker's... they did their homework.

Plague Inc is a game where you attempt to wipe out humanity with a pathogen. After choosing your basic type (virus, bacteria, bioweapon, etc.) and some unlockable starting traits, you pick a starting country on the map of the world then commence with a mini-game of collecting points that can be used to develop new mutations that allow the infection to spread and cause harm. Once the organism is discovered and develops enough bad effects, the game shifts to a race between civilization finding a cure and the disease spreading dependably and lethally enough to take down the world before it can be stopped.

It's fun, if a bid morbid. The actual controls are easy to master. It's the winning that takes learned patience and proper timing. It has a lot of educational value even though -- as its makers strongly emphasize in the midst of the current pandemic -- it can't actually model the transmission of real-world pathogens. Tell that to the idiots who've fallen for screenshots of the game thinking they were seeing projection maps of the spread of COVID-19. :/

The game also has lighter scenarios where you get to spread the zombie apocalypse, a vampire plague, and the rise of intelligent primates. Other scenarios abound. The developer has added more and more content to the game over the years. Kudos to them.

I do take issue with the achievements on this game: there are way too many that are almost impossible to get without studying a guide. The structure goes something like this: set up the possibility of getting the achievement by using the right combination of two to four variables you pick when starting your game. Then the conditions for the achievement might come up if the game progresses exactly as described -- which is either down to luck or extreme micro-management of game progression. The only way you could get all of them would be sinking hundreds of hours into the game, often playing the exact scenario multiple times to get it just right. At best, this means a huge swath of achievements are really meant to be random surprises involving no skill at all. At worst it's a time-wasting trap that preys on people who have serious OCD.

Definitely worth playing. Be prepared to fail at destroying the world quite a bit, because humans are really kinda smart and pathogens are only opportunistic.

And one last note... screw you, Greenland!

Beaten: 18-Jan-2020

Once again you must master solving a sequence of puzzles involving different rooms that have complex mechanical devices and hidden surprises. It's all done with an incredible eye for detail and design like its two predecessors, and the game helpfully provides hints to point you in the right direction if you feel lost.

Picking up where The Room Two left off, this game is surprisingly short on advancing the established plot, alluding to sinister powers and creatures vaguely resembling the Cthulu mythos but never quite offering enough to give the player a coherent picture of what is going on. Of course it is an excuse for the puzzle elements, which are really what the game is all about, so whether or not you get a satisfying story is beside the point.

Another minor criticism, however, is this game felt like I needed more hand-holding than before. This time many of the puzzles pieces and interaction points are scattered across multiple rooms, making it more difficult to make connections to something you find or do in one place that allows you to proceed somewhere else. Maybe a part of it is getting older or just being more impatient these days, but I never once needed the hints to make it through the first game and the second I only remember relying on them from time-to-time. In this game there were a few occasions where even with the hints and playing with everything I could manipulate I was stumped. I hate having to go to a guide for that kind of thing, but there it is.

Fun game though. Just not quite as good as the first two.

Beaten: 4-Mar-2020

Welcome to the space station, Tacoma. As an investigator tasked with figuring out what happened to the crew, you make your way from section to section examining the augmented reality recordings, electronic and personal correspondence and other miscellaneous evidence to fill in the blanks. This game is a walking simulator that tells a short story, so any discussion of the plot can quickly veer into giving away tidbits of information that's much more satisfying to discover during play.

On the technical side, Tacoma is a definite step up for the makers of Gone Home. The same exploration technique is featured but on a larger scale with more interactivity. The AR parts are particularly good as you can play, rewind and fast-forward them at will to follow some crew members then cut over and pick up other crew members who are having conversations in adjacent rooms at the same time. Everything about the controls for this is solid and quickly becomes mastered so that it's only you and the story. Nothing fiddly to interrupt the immersion.

The story, however, feels under-developed. It's got all the necessary elements for a compelling narrative with lots of great character details and some interesting background about what the year 2088 is like. But the final product is somewhat bland, delivering curiously few emotional highs or lows given the circumstances. If you are a fan of this genre it doesn't come anywhere near What Remains of Edith Finch, which set the emotional and exploratory high bar for this kind of story-telling.

At around 3 hours playtime, the game thankfully doesn't overstay its welcome. Worth a play-through if you are looking for a chill distraction for a few hours, but I'd advise getting it on sale.

Beaten: 4-Jan-2020

I returned to this game after first playing it almost four years ago when only the base content was available. Since then they have added children to the game and a mode called "stories" that tweak the play with unique plots and characters. Apart from that the game is as devastating as I remember it. You don't play this game to be happy. It's mainly about avoiding the worst possible outcomes in an already desperate situation.

The game is inspired by the Siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. You control a group of survivors trying to get through each day in the shell of an abandoned building in the besieged city of Porogen. During the day you manage your shelter and individual needs. At night (the only safe time to travel around the city) one of your group goes out scavenging for materials in dangerous locations while the others sleep and keep watch. In my only play-through four years ago my last survivor, Katia, died a mere two days before the end of the war. It was quite depressing.

This time around I was able to guide my group of three adults successfully through to the end. Another play-through that included a father and his daughter only had one casualty, another man who had joined them in the first week. I also played through two of the stories including another father-daughter scenario and one where you play the wife of the city's only radio operator, a disabled elderly man who can't fend for himself but is dedicated to getting life-saving information out to those trapped in the city. You help gather info for his broadcasts during your nightly forays. Each of these games were intense in their own right. I didn't play the final story which seems to center around your people trying to preserve a collection of historical and cultural artifacts from being destroyed and thus moving their base to different locales when needed.

This is a brilliant game even though it's mechanics are not difficult and the cycle of day-night activity is repetitive. The setting highlights how video games can be used to tell all kinds of stories -- even the ones that we should think about but typically avoid because they are unsettling. The night-time maps are the game's main point of diversity. I don't think I saw all of them. And some vary randomly being occupied by either good or bad people. Overall the game is challenging, because even if you avoid conflict there's the ever-present threats of illness, cold weather, lack of critical supplies and depression that will affect your group members and what you must do to help them.

Big thumbs up. And if you want to go an extra step for a good cause, purchasing the War Child Charity DLC goes to helping children from conflict zones. Highly recommended.

Beaten: 9-Jan-2020

If you loved the original Trine this is more of the same side-scrolling fantasy goodness. Once again you are in control of Zoya, Amadeus and Pontius as they are thrust into a new quest, traveling to the castle of a forgotten pair of princesses while goblins harass them along the way. I played this solo and had a great time. The sequel features most of the same powers as the original and some new ones. It's a cute, light-hearted romp of a game with gorgeous set pieces. The story is nothing special but is a serviceable back-drop to the action.

The game also comes with the Goblin Menace DLC included, but I was eager to move on to other games. May come back and complete it another time.