Goat Beats Backlog: First Blood

Minesweeper Plus

Actually I'm doing it huge disservice by calling it Minesweeper Plus. While the main concept is very similar to that of Microsoft's classroom/office time-killer, Hexcells is much better in every possible aspect. There are hexes instead of square fields and you need to figure out which hexes are blue (mines). And there's absolutely no need for blind clicking, every level can be solved without guessing. It's a perfect mindbender - challenging, but never frustrating.

Minor drawback is a white background that can be a bit straining for your eyes, especially since the game has strong "one-more-turn" factor to it. Game is very short, but Hexcells Complete Pack (3 games) is usually just 2,69€ on sale, but even at full price of 8,99€ it's one of the best deals on Steam.

Emily wants to play

Let me start by saying that Dishonored was perfect. I've always enjoyed stealth games with Thief, both The Dark Project and The Metal Age, being right there on top of my all-time favourites. What's more, a story-driven mixture of Thief and Hitman was something I really hoped to play one day. Dishonored delivered. With its steampunk world to top it off it was like a mother of all wet dreams came true. Suffice to say it is the first game ever that I did 2 consecutive playthroughs of, and I've been gaming since the late 80s.

The sequel isn't as good, but it isn't that far from the original either. What's most disappointing is that this time Arkane ignored the story aspect and everything that comes with it. It's a huge bummer because the game lacks that bond that made its predecessor possibly the best game I've ever played. They dropped the ball on optimization too, but this problem is quickly getting patched out, so I'm not really complaining.

That said, everything else that made me love Dishonored is still here and I enjoyed this game immensely. I've completed my stealth, low chaos playthrough with Corvo. Now it's time for Emily Kaldwin to reclaim her throne leaving a trail of mutilated corpses behind. Fun times.

Supergiant sword

I had big reservations about this game because while everyone was raving about Bastion, I couldn't really get why. I gave it several chances, and sure, graphics were great, narrator idea interesting, but the game itself quickly bored the hell out of me. Then came Transistor and the hype was on again. Year and a half after its release I finally decided to enter a Transistor giveaway. Well, I thought, at least I'll have better motivation to give it a proper go.

I finally did and it was a pretty swell experience that I ended up wishing was a bit longer. Excellent graphics and soundtrack are well known features, so I'll just say that combat was something that I found to be very enjoyable. And story too, good stuff. I'll definitely give Bastion another chance one day.

Shitbot is my spirit animal

Back in 2000 when I first played The Longest Journey I have to admit I was disappointed with it. Don't get me wrong, the game was good, I just didn't see anything special about it. Probably because while I loved the parts that took place in Newport, the cuteness of Arcadia didn't really sit well with me at the time. On the other hand, I didn't mind crappy stealth and combat sequences from Dreamfall that so many people had gripe with, and I liked it much more. And over the years I kept reading how great the first part was, and how big of al let down sequel was.

I'm telling you this because it's funny how time can change your perspective. I've re-played both TLJ and Dreamfall recently in preparation to play Chapters and came to appreciate the former much more than all those years ago (I still liked Dreamfall just as much as before, but I could see why people were angry about it). The latest iteration of the saga is a fine conclusion. Great story, some amazing characters (Crow & Shitbot!), solid voice overs, good music, fantastic visuals and locations are definitely the strong points of Dreamfall Chapters. It's not perfect, though. After a strong beginning it slowly starts to lose its pacing and ultimately borders borders being straight up boring somewhere mid-game. Fortunately it makes a complete u-turn later and last 2 books are amazing. The other problem is optimization, or rather complete lack thereof. My PC is not a monster, but it has enough power to run Witcher 3 with mostly maxed-out settings and smooth 60fps @1080p. Yet it struggled to do the same with Dreamfall Chapters. Due to spending most of my PC gaming years with a hardware that was average at best I rarely whine about performance issues, but from a game that had its first episode released over 2 years ago I expected much more in this regard.

Electric sperm saves the day

Nice and relaxing platformer/runner mix with a surprisingly good soundtrack. In my humble opinion not worth the regular price, though.

You play as a sparkly electric ball with a task of bringing back electricity to a city sunk in darkness after major power outage. Most of the time you'll spend traversing the power lines spread between various structures, powering up street lamps, houses, AC units, etc. in variety of neighbourhoods. Your performance is measured by the number of things you manage to power up and amount of little lightning bolt tokens you collect on your way through the levels. There's no real difficulty in it as you can't die. Every few stages game changes into kind of a runner/rhythm game. These levels can be actually challenging, especially if you want to want to gather all collectibles, but I guess it's mostly due to the sudden contrast in difficulty.

TurnOn was made by a team of 4, which is impressive, but it shows. Game's very short and it gets buggy once you get closer to the end. I enjoyed it for its casual, relaxing gameplay, pretty graphics and nice soundtrack, but I got it for free. Had I paid 15 euro for it, I think I would be much more critical. It's worth considering on sale, bundled it will be definitely worth getting.

Also worth noting is it plays much better with controller, even though originaly apparently it supported only keyboard.

Girl in the Tower, Madwoman in the Attic

Down-scrolling precision platformer. Pretty easy, I guess, since I've been able to beat it without any frustrations and normally I suck big time at games like that. It's very pretty, controls are responsive and the rudimentary story is kinda funny too. Game's very short which makes it great choice for a free evening.

The sword isn't broken at all

I'm re-playing the series in order to refresh my memory before finally playing Broken Sword 5. I have to say I'm having fun and enjoy them every bit as much as years ago. 3rd installation of this point and click saga is a bit of a downgrade for the franchise, though. There's very few puzzles, lots of crates to push around to create a path and horrible controls. Otherwise it's more of the same. With trademark characters, funny dialogues and mysterious conspiracies and phenomena this time including The Voynich manuscript, telluric energy and the usual suspects in form of Knights Templar.

Overall, a very nice blast from the past.