Fenchurch's Mid-Monthly Update of Backlog Assassination #1
Hello again and welcome to my first official update post! I’ve not been here long but I’ve been reading and commenting on lots of articles and it seems that (sensibly & probably quite predictably) most people seem to do their main update posts at the end of the month/start of the new month. Well I’m not most people and I like to do things a little differently so I’ve decided to make my update a mid-monthly project that probably won’t contain much in the way of actually finishing games. Being a lazy so-and-so this also gives me a bit of leeway to procrastinate with the exact days of posting which is always nice too!
In a crazy turn of events It’s actually been quite a good start to the backlog assassination as I actually finished a couple of games (believe me this is not a regular thing to happen).
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New Games: 4
- Gorogoa
2.1 hours playtime
- The Council
5.0 hours playtime
- Infinifactory
0.9 hours playtime
- Titan Souls
0.3 hours playtime
Gorogoa is a nice little puzzle game I picked up from a GA win on Steamgifts that’s had some great reviews from friends.
The Council Episode 2: Hide and Seek released a couple of months ago and I just realised I hadn’t got around to it yet!
I traded for Infinifactory a while ago and it just took my fancy recently for absolutely no reason other than I happened to spot it on my list in Steam one day!
I’ve had Titan Souls for so long I don’t even remember where I got it, probably a Steam sale. It’s been on my rader as a ‘maybe’ for playing for a while now.
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Finished This Month: 3
I’m gonna start of by explaining that I’m realistic and honest with my ratings. 6/10 certainly doesn’t mean that a particular game was bad, just average. In the same light you will very rarely find me giving a game a 9/10 rating and probably never 10/10 as there’s really no such thing as a perfect game! I might actually make a post about game ratings one day if I can be bothered.
Dishonored 2
29.4 hours, 24 of 50 achievements
Traded for on Steamtrades
As I had never played the original Dishonored (only watched a let’s play) I actually thoroughly enjoyed my first 10-15 hours of Dishonored 2 discovering how the stealth mixed with supernatural abilities felt really intuitive to play and really suited my style of gaming. When it comes to stealth games I love to explore, find the best way to complete an objective with minimal disruption to the world around me and Dishonored 2 was a good example of allowing a player to pull this off if they wanted to.
The level design is top notch, there are lots of different paths to take to get to your objectives and upgrading skills didn’t take too long. This meant that the gameplay never really felt stale as it often changed when you upgraded your character and skills. It was definitely the strongest point of the game and what kept me going with it. Story wise it wasn’t so great. I though the original game’s story really fitted well, but this time around it almost seemed tacked on in a lot of places. Not very well though out, not much too it and the supporting characters weren’t as strong (with the exception of the return of Sokolov). This is why after 15 or so hours I found myself not really enjoying the story but instead treating each of the levels like challenge maps to mix up my abilities and have some fun with.
All in all I enjoyed my time with this game and would recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the first or who like stealth action games like the Deus Ex reboots.
Rating 7/10
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Gorogoa
2.1 hours, 7 of 11 achievements
Won on Steamgifts
Gorogoa is a great little casual puzzle game with an awesome sense of design in terms of the puzzles it produces. It’s a hard one to review as half of the fun is discovering how these puzzles transform themselves in front of your eyes. What I can explain is the basics of the puzzle mechanics and how well this works with the game as a whole.
The on screen ‘puzzle board’ is split into four areas, these areas can be used to manipulate the picture you are given in various different ways. Sometimes that means joining pieces together like a jigsaw, sometimes splitting pieces apart to find more clues and sometimes, well sometimes there is much more to do than first meets the eye! The puzzles are really intelligent and never did I feel cheated or frustrated. The gameplay is really fluid and enjoyable and if you don’t mind minor spoilers you should watch a trailer to get the best idea of exactly what I mean.
Gorogoa isn’t a long game, it took me just over 2 hours to complete and as good as those two hours were I find that hard to justify the price tag if I were to have paid for the game. If you like casual puzzle solving, intelligent and beautiful design and don’t mind splashing out for a couple of hours gameplay then by all means go for it. My recommendation would be to pick it up in a sale
Rating 8/10
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The Council
7.5 hours, 21 of 42 achievements
Review copy from developers
As a whole The Council leaves me with a mixed bag of feelings. After playing and finishing two of the five planned episodes there are bits about it i like and bits I’m not so keen on.
For starters the overlying story and game mechanics are great. There’s a lot of mystery to the story and the dialogue with each of the characters, giving you just enough to keep you thinking about what could be going on. The game mechanics also work well for the most part. The developers Big Bad Wolf have called this an Adventure game with RPG elements and the skill tree they have implemented works really well in terms of branching the story and the paths you have available at your disposal. For example you can choose to train your character in manipulating people through conversation, knowledge and etiquette, or you could go down the detective role that I chose and excel in questioning, spotting clues and understanding the psychology of someones actions and remarks. Both paths would allow you to access certain routes and conversations in the game and for this I really think The Council is making a great and long overdue change to the Adventure genre.
On the other hand there are a few things that are off putting and that drag the game down a little. Like the voice acting, which sometimes is passable but for large periods is noticeably dodgy especially when concerning the main character. While the overall level and character design is also pretty good the animations can also be pretty dodgy. Sometimes a hand bends the wrong way or a person moves as if they’ve broken every bone in their body and this is another off putting factor but one I’m sure that many people wouldn’t be all that bothered about.
So far after two episodes (the second a lot shorter than the first) I still have a positive feeling about the game and while it’s not done much in terms of advancing the story so far, I’m still interested to see where it ends up. Hopefully the last three episodes can improve.
Rating 6/10
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Still Playing: 5
- Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin
28.7 hours playtime
- Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun
3.4 hours playtime
- Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire
7.9 hours playtime
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance
19.8 hours playtime
no achievements
- Elite Dangerous
113.4 hours playtime
no achievements
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Given Up On: 1
- FreeCell Quest
6.5 hours playtime
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Hopefully a bit of my fancy-pantsness is starting to showing off, you guys gave me a lot of tips and I’m going to try adding a few things on each new post and keep what I like. One thing I couldn’t find out how to do was change the colour of normal text (not the generated game box stuff). Is that possible? Can someone show me an example. Thanks in advance! Thanks uguleley, I made the post heading your chosen red in honour of your teachings! XD
Feel free to comment if you’ve played any of these games and want to discuss something or just want some general chat! I’ll try to get back to you all eventually!
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A bit sad to hear that about The Council as well. :/ I guess, I should avoid getting hyped for a game.
Anyway, have fun with those 5 games. Shadow Tatics is really fun (jI highly recommend avoiding the speedrun achievements and play at your own pace) and I heard good things about both PoE2 and KC:D
KC:D is great so far but it’s one of those game that is so immersive and really is most rewarding if you have a massive chunk of time to sit down and play it, which a lot of the time now I don’t. Most of my gaming life these days is short bursts or very rarely at the most a couple hours! I will get back to it eventually for sure though!
Nice post! I can’t help you with your question at the end…but it intrigued me, maybe I’ll have a closer look when it’s not a weekend but someone else already did :)
Thank you for the review of ‘The Council’. The game looks really interesting, but had some offputting reviews. Yours is not so different. I think I’ll keep my eye on it, but won’t buy it in the near future.
About the rating: I am with you. I base my ratings on a 5 star system and 3/5 is an average game, nothing great, but still okay. I think one should use the whole range a rating metric offers. What use is it, when you rate based on 10 points, but only award in the range of 7-10? Of course, naturally we will rate games as above average more often than not, but that’s mostly because we tend to play games that somehow looked interesting and not too bad in the first place.
Good luck with your ongoing games, I see some very time-consuming ones there!
Totally agree with you about the review ratings. I used to do game reviews for a website and this was a hot topic for me as our rating system was essentially an ‘out of 5’ but each rating had a title and description. The description of the middle rating was ‘above average’ which irked me a bit. But anyway I learnt what it meant to properly rate a game!
Good luck with Titan Souls, like JaffaCaffa mentioned it can be a bit frustrating at times. Walking back the same route for the umpteenth time to the boss room isn’t very exciting, but at least the checkpoints aren’t too far away - maybe 15-20sec at most. The bosses have good variety though, and the controls are solid. At least that was my impression, I was playing with a controller.
One thing I couldn’t find out how to do was change the colour of normal text (not the generated game box stuff). Is that possible? Can someone show me an example. Thanks in advance!
You can add HTML in your post, so you can use font tags to change colour.
Thanks uguleley, I made the post heading your chosen red in honour of your teachings! XD
I’ve been keeping my eye on The Council and wondering how they’ve implemented RPG with adventure, something I haven’t really seen done since… I don’t know, Quest for Glory games? Questionable production values are definitely something I can deal with so I suppose it’s another game I’ll have to get once all five episodes are out.
Yeah have to admit I do prefer playing these types of games when all episodes are out and I can take it at my own pace (which is always faster than one episode per x months wait time). Also unless you have the strongest story, having to wait for each episode always dilutes the experience some what! :(
As for the RPG elements, they basically added a skill tree and that’s about all I’ve noticed so far. A good addition in this particular games setting though!
I’m playing dishonored 2 this month as well-
in dishonored one I tried a clean hands ghost stealthy stealth game and cause of something in the tutorial I didn’t get ghost. and replaying through I had zero fun and trailed off
so for this game I’ve been playing as lethal as I can while still getting ghost…and I’m having alot more fun then I would otherwise. dropping down on a guard and then tossing the body off a cliff a few seconds later and teleporting up to a safe perch is incredibly satisfying when you dont get caught.
Gone are the days when I try for these play a game in X way achievements. I prefer to play how I feel like playing without being forced to do anything, if I could remove achievements from all games I wouldn’t even hesitate, but that’s a rant for another day!
Not trying to take away from your enjoyment, I’m just being a grumpy gamer!!! Glad you’re liking it.
I have no intrest in trying to 100% complete it or anything :3
I just liked the extra challenge of not being seen (but found killing people funner)
Yeah I totally didn’t mean that to be a comment on your choice of play style, just that you were talking about not having fun replaying in the same way and made me think to say it :)
Congrats on winning Gorogoa! Absolutely adored that game. Agree that all of these kinda games that only last a couple hours are steep (especially in a world with so many bundles), but I try to compare it to something like buying a movie since I love the experience and they tend to be my favourites. Still have to try for the couple few moves achievement, but I’ve heard it’s pretty tight window. Not sure I wanna turn the game into something frustrating, if I mess something up.
Speaking of frustrating…good luck with Titan Souls. :P Found that one unnecessarily frustrating/tedious, but at least it was realllly satisfying (and a relief) beating it.
I was hyped over The Council, but have heard so many consistent mixed opinions. A real shame, will have to keep my eye out on what people think of it as a whole.
Btw any particular reason you gave up on FreeCell Quest? I was umming and ahhing about activating it last year, but since I like card games went ahead despite the mixed reviews.
I’ve 100% completed Microsoft’s Solitaire Collection so I thought I would get on well with something like FreeCell Quest that would give me a bit of a different edge on the card game genre. Honestly I did have fun with it for the first few hours. You can use spells during the game to shuffle a row for example, but there are many spells and they are not well implemented.
I finished about 150 of the puzzles but I found myself at the end to not really be using spells other than to defend from attacks. They try to ramp the difficulty by attacking you constantly and this mechanic just frustrated me. Also every time you beat a puzzle you conquer a town/city etc but these can be retaken meaning you have to do them all over again…
Titan Souls is already kicking my ***, don’t think I have the patience for it! XD
Oh wow I heard it was quite brutal after a while, didn’t realise they could take back the locations. Can definitely see how that’d get old if constantly taking one step forward one step back. Thanks for letting me know.
And yeah if you’re already running out of patience it only gets worse. :P Still was the happiest I’d been to beat a game in a looong time. haha