Monthly Report - February/March 2021

• Won : -
• Free : Delores: A Thimbleweed Park Mini-Adventure, Simutrans
• From bundles/gifts/sales : Metro 2033 Redux

• Legend of Grimrock 2
  

  101 hours playtime

  60 of 60 achievements

Legend of Grimrock 2 - completed

I won that one on SteamGifts a very long time ago, I’m not sure why I didn’t play it since, because I loved it.
Its gameplay is very different, I was a bit surprised (it took me several minutes to just get out of the cage ^^), and the movement system require some time to get used to (your movement only follow a grid pattern, and you can only move and fight on the x & y axes).
This is mostly an exploration and puzzle game, and most of them are nice and diverse enough (some, especially near the end, are a little bit stupid though), and the world is quite big, with a lot to explore, a lot of secrets hidden everywhere. As I love exploring worlds this was great for me.
I also liked a lot the magic system, where you draw your spells over runes (kind of Magicka but a bit easier), so you cannot just click on an icon, and you still need to concentrate when you’re in panic mode ;). This also means that you really learn spells, all spells can be casted as soon as you have the right magic level, you just have to know how. Same for alchemy. I like this system.
Enemies are quite diverse, with each their behavior, skills and weaknesses, some very annoying (the frogs !) but it makes combat quite fun. The game can be quite hard though, especially on your first playthrough, when you don’t know the enemies, and the traps, when you don’t know where to use your lockpicks and gold keys to avoid wasting them…
I don’t have a lot of issues with the game, but there are still a few things that annoyed me : it feels a bit unfair sometimes (you can easily be stuck between monsters, and if this happens, it is very hard to get out of that), as I said, a few puzzles feel more like a guess than clever, and the damage system is not reliable. You can have a very powerful character that will hit with 100 normal damage, and next hit will be a 10 critical damage (on the same monster), so some fights can be very long and frustrating, just because of that randomness.
But overall it was very fun, I liked it a lot, and I’ll probably take a look on the first one.

Achievements : As usual, a lot of achievements are unlocked just by playing, some of them are a bit grindy though. And at the end of my first playthrough I had found most of the secrets (with something like 5-6 missing… the issue is that once you are at the end, it is hard to find the missing ones, it is easier to restart a game and look for them harder ^^)
For me completing all achievements required five complete playthroughs : the first “normal” one without checking the achievements, a partial one for the “Gluttony” achievement. I first wanted to try to do the “Insane Ironman” (you can only save at crystals, and each crystal can be used once) and “Hard boiled” (hard mode) on the same playthrough, but hard mode was really hard, and I got fed up of losing so much progress. So I did one in hard mode, and one on normal difficulty for the Insane Ironman (which sound scary but is not that hard in normal mode, when you know the game, plan your saves and choose the right time for hard combats).
As for “Doin’ it old school” (complete the game without map), at first I though that I would never do that :). But after all those playthroughs, I knew the maps pretty well so it wasn’t really hard (and I didn’t do it on paper, I’m not crazy ! There are too many teleport situations to be able to keep track !), the only real difficulty is water : without map, if you go in the water, you better know where the ladders are !
So this game achievements require quite some work, but if you like the game, replaying it with a different build is a pleasure ;)

• Hitman: Sniper Challenge
  

  2 hours playtime

  no achievements

Hitman: Sniper Challenge - completed

I think this one was free, it looks like a promotional game for the Hitman reboot.
But there is “sniper” in its name, so I’m interested :). And it’s a nice little game, it took me a couple of hours to complete all challenges and I enjoyed it.

Achievements : There are no achievements, but as in the main Hitman game, there are some challenges. I completed all of them, although a few took me some time to find, and one required a look on the Internet (the flying bird one, and even knowing it, it was quite hard to get).