The Quiet Breath of a Low-Count July - Wrap-Up
Last month turned out pretty much as I thought it would. I played for an intense, hour-burning set of days at the launch of Secret World Legends early in the month, but those are invisible hours - the game was just released on Steam a couple of days ago, so the prior time was all off-list. Now I’m back on the Steam clock for future reference. I had a heavy performance schedule, and what time there was outside of Kingsmouth didn’t lend itself to a lot of other gaming. I finished a freebie quickie game early on, and then just padded a few hours onto the belly of my backlog without adding any other wins.
Alreadies:
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Violett
10 hours playtime
11 of 22 achievements
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The Witcher: Enhanced Edition
26 hours playtime
no achievements
I’m a little stuck in Violett (2013, Steamgifts win). I’m in that pre-walkthrough state: I’d like to find my own way out of the puzzles, but I’m not seeing what I don’t see. I think I’m well along in the body of the game, and somewhere there’s something I’m missing, so now it’s a matter of finding my way to the mystery before I lose patience. I like this game very much, though I can see why others might not. It insists on being its own beast. Also, there’s this one green orb in the cukoo-clock room, and it’s hiding behind a menu item so I can’t click on it, and that’s driving me bats.
The Witcher (2008) is my July monthly Long Game pick, and obviously I didn’t finish it. I put my 20+ hours in, though, and it’s a fantastic game. I’m in the middle of Chapter II at the moment, just starting to venture across to the swamps but with plenty of business to attend in town; I suck at boxing and I’m middling at dice, and this game is delightful. I didn’t make the end-of-month deadline, but in my own head this is going to stay as a challenge game. I knew it was long when I started playing - that’s the nature of the challenge. I reckon I’ll be generous with my personal deadlining.
Violett does look like a fun game I can play with my kids, but it also looks like it would be hard to beat it (let alone complete it) without a walkthrough. We’ll see…
The Witcher (1) is the only one in the series I’ve played so far (although I’m itching to play the second). I really loved it, but I can’t seem to finish a full-scale RPG in less than 80 hours (about 105 for The Witcher for me). Which means I can’t even really play my favorite genre anymore– I play in short spurts every few days and always forget what the heck I was doing (let alone the combat controls).
Anyway, thanks for the update and good luck with both games!
Violett insistently rewards thorough exploration, which I like. This doesn’t always work; in some puzzles the logic is invisible to me even after experimentation, though I’m usually able to brute-click my way through (one defeated me completely and I went to find it on video). There’s a lot of obscure use of arrows, as in left/right or up/down increments or switches that affect elements in the scene in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. Sometimes I really have no idea what they’re looking for. Other puzzles resolve after some effort, which always feels good. Sometimes when a puzzle won’t solve it’s because there’s more to do elsewhere, but that’s not always the case. There isn’t much useful feedback, and I wish the devs were a little more forthcoming that way.
I’m also a slow player, and always have been. Partly I’m just slow, and I also like exploring and looking around. I’ve been lamenting for years my loss of long, sprawling, story-rich RPGs. I have them, I buy them, I look at them, I yearn for them, but at this point - I have no kids, but I have a day job and an arts career outside it - my life just doesn’t feature rich stretches of easy downtime. Time was I would only pay good money for a game that promised 50 to 100 hours of play, and now those numbers are like a bruise. The Witcher is the first long game I’ve attacked in ages - usually I’m in exactly the boat you describe, trying to remember what I’m after in this set of caverns, which spells were working best, and whether this is a game with right-clicks or keyboard shortcuts. That generally leads to starting over and never finishing. I was glad of the Long Game challenge, though, because it feels nice to be back in the kind of game I used to love so well.
Link fixed– thanks.
Looks like we are similar gamers. I love RPGs and TBS, but can’t seem to have free, non-kid time to play them. So I usually play shorter games, or simple ARPGs or platformers or puzzle-platformers with the kids. My attempt at The Long Game challenge was an abject failure. 3.6 hours of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines in July. And now I can’t remember how to survive in combat. ;)
To make it worse, I’m a completionist, both in content and in achievements…