Beaten and completed

Shockingly, this update didn’t take me months for once!

I wasn’t a huge fan of Sacrament but they had a promotion if you played it, I had some extra steam wallet and it didn’t look that bad. Honestly, it doesn’t look bad, but after a little bit, the translation starts having obvious issues and in some places it doesn’t even have the correct names for the characters. Beyond the technical issues, I have no idea how many endings there are but unfortunately I found 3 or 4 that end up with the same character in different ways.. which wouldn’t be an actual issue but what IS an issue is that in at least a couple of cases, no matter how much you go against a certain character and no matter how much you reject them, you still get an ending where you live happily with them, in one way or another. I tried going even further back by going right back to the beginning, only to find out this game’s skip button skips over text you haven’t read yet, which is basically where I gave up. I mean, it’s pretty bad, but if you only want to go for one ending, you should be fine, I guess. Also, no, it didn’t take me 10 hours, I was just half-bored with it and let it run in the background and read a bit every now and then.

Who Is Mike is definitely one of my favorite free games steam has to offer. There are a lot of endings and I went to find 4-5 on my own, only to do the rest with a guide. Thankfully, this one does not skip over unread text. I loved the art and I loved the story, and I think I saw something about a possible sequel? The best thing about this game is that the reality of the game itself changes according to what you choose, so, basically, not everything that is true in one ending is true in all of them.

I hate Zup! 6 with a passion. I know I’m late on the hate train, but I hate this one specifically because it feels like it was more rushed than the others, because I don’t remember any of the other ones having problems with where things would fall. In this one I had a bunch of levels where I was basically at the mercy of wherever the hell the game wanted to move one piece whenever I started the level. It’s the only one in the series that made me lag behind the releases, and it took me months to come back to it. I understand that difficult puzzle games exist, but first of all the Zup! series isn’t difficult and second of all that’s.. not how you do difficulty.

I’m marking PickCrafter as beaten for now out of spite because I’m 800 hours in I’ve gotten almost all of the non-event related achievements, minus one that requires wicked luck or real life $$, and the other one mostly$$ or a lot of time. Or both. I’ll still have it open any day I have time because I’m addicted in order to make it as easy as possible to get the last achievements when their events pop up, and to also get the other two that will take me a very, very long time. Minus the issues I have with those 2 achievements, this is pretty much my favorite clicker so far. I love the simple graphics (obviously inspired by Minecraft) and the overall design of it, but my favorite thing is that the developer(s) is(/are) still active and the game gets frequent updates, not only for fixing bugs, but also for incorporating new, fun mechanics to the game. I’ve only started playing it fairly recently but I’ve already seen at least 2-3 major game-changing updates that everyone likes.

Orwell was such a pleasant surprise! I’ve been complaining (to myself mostly) how I’ve lost the ability to focus on actually finishing things (games, books, tv shows) and how nothing ever captivates me enough, and yesterday I just really wanted to start it thinking I want to open it and do a few tasks every now and then (since it seemed to be that type of game), but I ended up playing it in one go, which hasn’t happened to me in a long time. I absolutely loved everything about it and I ended up being mad at myself for some of the choices I made; I’m still wondering whether it’s worth starting over or not, because, in a way, I feel like it would ruin the magic, kind of like in Telltale games I always stick with the choices I make, no matter the consequences. Either way, it was a very immersive game that brought new things and changed its pace at perfect times to make it not repetitive and boring. I was so tired when I started playing it and I wanted to sleep so bad, but I just couldn’t take my hands off this game. I can’t wait to get the sequel as well!

How to shoot a criminal was fairly interesting, and I would only recommend it if you have patience. It’s very clearly inspired by Her Story (which I absolutely LOVED), yet it’s still bringing its own, new elements. While in Her Story the videos are from interviews/confessions at the police station, in How to shoot a criminal you search through newspapers (because the whole story is basically about a newspaper) that show you actual scenes; so, told stories vs actual events. It doesn’t really make sense, but.. let’s ignore that for the sake of the game. You also get audio-only pieces (vinyls I’m assuming? since it’s set in the 1900-somethings) and actual notes/clippings that are read-only. So while not a lot of this makes sense, the story doesn’t really either. The whole game is recorded in French and it’s translated in English just through subtitles. I don’t personally speak French, so I’m assuming a lot was lost in translation, but what made it worse is that the whole idea of the game is to search.. with.. words.. which is kind of difficult when a bunch of them are misspelled. I’m sure it could’ve been a pretty great game, but it just.. wasn’t. It’s okay. The acting is definitely poor and it’s easy to see the budget wasn’t very big, but you get used to it eventually. What is unforgivable is that if you’re not very patient to try to decipher what they were trying to say, it seems like the whole story doesn’t make a lot of sense. Stories about Hitler seem to be a big focus, especially with one of the creators/writers of the newspaper being Jewish, and yet.. it doesn’t really show. While Her Story gets away with feeling cold and somewhat vague, it feels like How to shoot a criminal’s story needed to be quite a bit more precise to make a whole lot of sense.

Shame pile

Shame pile again! I had actually wishlisted Run Away a long time ago because I was actually curious of the story but as soon as I saw it was an achievement-spam game it just turned me away from that completely. From the reviews, I see I wasn’t missing out on much.

Trivia Vault is yet another really bad series of games that could’ve easily been compiled into one bigger game. These games are ridiculously ugly and boring but I’m surprised they all seem legitimately functional.