This update is brought to you by Lady Santa. Without her, this update would not have been possible.

Dear Diary,

For the most part I avoid writing BLAEO updates, because I prefer to write in excruciating detail and I tend to struggle with writing in general. Also, writing is like cooking, it takes hours to prepare, and minutes to consume.

I was originally thinking about ducking out of (as usual) the April challenge because I haven’t been in the mood lately to play any games, but I wasn’t able to escape Lady Santa’s radar.

And this month’s nominees are:

Game 1: Defy Gravity - Play Time: 1 hour

Here’s the interesting part: Lady Santa had no prior knowledge of what kinds of games I liked or disliked, and it just so happens that four of the five games picked had tags which I tend to avoid - Point and Click, Hidden Object Game, Visual Novel. So I was already in for an interesting ride.

I started with Defy Gravity, since it was tagged as a platformer and those are games I tend to excel at. Only…I didn’t consider this a platformer. I considered this game to be a physics level-based puzzle game, which is another type of game I avoid. Whoops!

I gave this game an honest attempt for about an hour, but I ended up stopping because I couldn’t figure out the controls, despite being halfway through the game. The game went by pretty quickly - an achievement would pop up every 3-4 levels or so. I somehow got the title of “Master Gravitymancer” without knowing what the heck I was doing.

The gameplay was incredibly difficult to master. You could fire portals which would either repel (yellow) or attract (blue). I almost never used blue portals because I’d get sucked in and get stuck while all the projectiles started flying into my face. Scary stuff. I stuck with yellow ones for the most part.

The mechanics were tough too. Your character doesn’t have very good horizontal or vertical mobility, so it was extremely difficult to dodge waves of projectiles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eMP3cz_MjI



Game 2: Time Mysteries: Inheritence - Remastered

A very love hate love relationship, in a nutshell. I started off expecting myself to suck, because I already knew I was notoriously bad at HOGs. I’ve only played one HOG game on Steam prior to this one: Enigmatis: The Ghosts of Maple Creek, and I did not enjoy it. As expected, each Hidden Object minigame averaged about 10+ minutes…which honestly isn’t that bad considering the hidden object minigames in Enigmatis took me like 30-40 minutes on average. Yes, I’m really that bad at HOGs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URf7DwvjCPI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJEdXXPb550
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RljEff_nB0w

How Long to Beat for this game was 3.5 hours. I took 6.7 hours. I learned a lot about myself in the process though, so I’m very glad this game was picked. Every game has its story, I’ll tell you mine.

I was expecting each Hidden Object scene to take me 30-40 minutes, so I was pleasantly surprised when I found out I was only taking 10 minutes. I actually enjoyed the story too. The plot was nice and linear, and very unlike a point and click game. Enigmatis was more of a point and click game, which was why I completely hated it. I was very pleasantly surprised that I was suggested a Hidden Object game I tolerated.

Then I’m not entirely sure what happened. Halfway through the story, I started failing really hard at all of the hidden object games. The problem was that a lot of the objects were camouflaged, and my eyes aren’t exactly the sharpest things in the world. Brown backgrounds especially gave me a hard time because I could not see anything. It got to a point where I just started clicking on random things and not really enjoying the game. The last straw was a puzzle that refused to cooperate with me no matter how hard I spamclicked.

This puzzle made me ragequit.

So after about forty minutes of blindly clicking in the puzzle, I decided enough was enough and I went to seek help from a guide. I ended up using the guide for a few more hidden object puzzles afterwards, because the camouflaged objects were giving me a really hard time.

Then all of a sudden, something just clicked and I suddenly got really good the remainder of the game. Maybe I had a really nice nap, or maybe I just decided that I was trying too hard. Not sure, but I actually started to enjoy myself again. My strategy was this, find all of the objects that I could, then use the previews to find the remainder of the objects. If I couldn’t find any of the objects, I would resort to spamclicking. This strategy ended up working pretty well, I was in and out of a few hidden object scenes within a few minutes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwPhhr5UIrc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-aaTrReRZ8

All in all, I did enjoy this game, and I learned a ton about myself. Here’s a summary of what I learned:
-Hidden Object scenes that were dark, shadowy, or brown were super annoying, because there would always be a few camouflaged objects.
-I’m too patient for this game.
-I have a really hard time visualizing things. If you ask me to find a certain object, I create an image of it in my head and look for that object. If the object is oriented a different way, I won’t be able to find it.
-I won’t actually know what certain objects look like. For example, in Enigmatis, I was supposed to find a “air freshener.” It wasn’t until I resorted to spam clicking until I noticed that an “air freshener” is shaped like a Christmas tree.
-Once I tone down my patience and resort to spamclicking earlier, I actually have a lot of fun with HOGs since I eliminate all of the frustration.



Game 3: Quest for Infamy - Play Time: 1.3 hours

Not very long lived. I played for a short amount of time, then realized that the first achievement was broken.
Unfortunately, this was a dealbreaker for me, and I decided not to continue with the game.

It didn’t seem like a game I would enjoy. I’m not a great thinker, so I’m terrible at “figuring out” what I need to do in point and click games. Sometimes, I find point and click games way too obscure for me. For example, I won’t know to pick up a stick that’s randomly hidden on the map so I can coat it with sap that I get somewhere else so I can use the sticky stick to retrieve another key item.

It also took me a good five to ten minutes to figure out how to open a door or talk to people. I was running around the town like an idiot wondering why I couldn’t interact with anything.

The humor to me was okay, but I did find it crude at times. The voice acting was done quite nicely though - it definitely added to the experience of the game.



Game 1: Defy Gravity - Total play time: 2.4 hours

Whoa what? Why are we talking about this game again?
After about a week of ignoring this game, I decided to try it again. And the remainder of the game was very, very frustrating. Projectiles flying everywhere, countless number of deaths, not to mention I was still not used to the mechanics. Good thing this game is incredibly short, I ended up tackling a few levels a day until I completed the game. There’s an achievement for completing the game on hard mode… nope.

I also found a pretty interesting bug too. There were certain levels where you had to wait for a platform to move around, but the platform would continue moving if you paused the screen. I may or may not have used this to my advantage.



Game 4: Hero of the Kingdom 8.5 hours

Definitely my favorite one of the bunch, although the last few achievements were incredibly incredibly grindy. One of the achievements was to amass 5000 gold - so the process was to buy a sack of grain for 30g, take it to the mill to turn into flour, then take it to another NPC to turn the flour into 6 pieces of bread, which would sell for 9g each. The problem was you could only sell loaves of bread in batches of 1. Which means you had to click 556 times in order to get the 5000 gold.

Story was super linear too, so I didn’t have to think too much, and there were also various hidden objects (eggs, mushrooms) across the world map. I called it “the kind of HOG that was made for me”, because I actually knew what I was looking for.

I actually didn’t find the story to be incredibly engaging, which is probably because it was mostly text based and I’m not a great reader, but the story was still pretty good. I really enjoyed how this game felt a lot like an RPG, and I enjoyed completing quests for various people and doing my chivalrous duties.

I somehow managed to get all of the achievements too without a guide! So that was a great win for me.



Game 5: Soul Gambler - Play time 3.2 hours

I left this game for last because figured it would be an easy game, being a visual novel. Nope, I was so wrong. I tend to avoid visual novels because I’m a terrible reader. Like, really terrible. I’m the type that ignores instructions or tutorials because I don’t really feel like reading or listening to the tutorial, which usually comes back to bite me.

The visual novel itself was interesting, however it had one major flaw. There was no “skip read text” feature which most visual novels had, and there were four achievements that were “ending” achievements. Which means I had to spend 4 different runs just clicking through a 20 minute story which I’ve already read. Yikes. Each “choice” would lead to a different achievement, but in the end, it didn’t seem like my choices affected the story too much.

I would recommend this game for a single playthrough, because the story is actually quite interesting. However, I would put the remainder of the achievements under the grindy category.

In Conclusion:
I had a lot of fun! I actually wasn’t sure if I could get through all five games in time. I actually started off my forcing myself, but I ended up having a lot of fun learning a lot about myself. The extra motivation from being challenged definitely helped. I’m definitely more flexible with HOGs now, which was something I never thought I’d do!

A great big thank you for everyone who pitched into this month’s challenge!
And another special thank you to Lady Santa for spending the time to pick games for me to play! You definitely helped me recover my gaming spirit again!

Until next time!
Tumalu