UPDATE NUMBER UNKNOWN +22, ABOUT SWIMMING AND DEMON HUNTING.
June monhtly theme was a success for me. I went back and replayed a previously finished game for achievements, replayed and finished a previously unfinished game and even played my very first SG win, from some 5(!) years ago, that I probably wouldn’t touch otherwise (those were the times when I did the classic newbie mistake of entering giveaways for pretty much everything, regardless of whether I actually wanted the game or not). Please don’t blacklist me, I learned my lesson fairly quickly :D
The (JUN) label indicates games played for the June monthly theme.
🕒 ~8 hours
⭐ 19/23
⁉️ STATUS: Beaten (JUN)
✔️ LIKED: The graphic style, maybe? It’s nothing innovative nowadays, but I still find it visually appealing.
❌ DISLIKED: This is a needlessly frustrating exploration-wannabe that barely makes any sense. The “challenge” comes entirely from bad desing choices, poor pathfinding and cheap deaths. You have not one, but two meters to keep an eye on: battery for the drone and oxygen for the diver. If either runs out, it’s a game over. The text on screen is way too tiny and multiple voice lines will occasinally interrupt each other, killing any backstory or atmosphere the game might have. Frequent glitches (this was especially glaring in one level consisting of “partition walls” that were repeatedly opening and closing, making way for the diver - some would randomly get stuck in the “closed” position, forcing me to restart the whole level several times). I guess this was supposed to be a “deep”, “dark” exploration kinda game, but it comes out as dull and unpleasant.
⚠️ WARNING: If you finish the game with the “non-ending” (you will, because the “true ending” was most likely not implemented properly), the game will erase your saves if you click the round arrow on the credits screen. Be sure to alt-tab out of the game and close the window or kill the process in task manager to prevent that from happening.
🕒 ~2 hours
⭐ N/A
⁉️ STATUS: Beaten
✔️ LIKED: Interesting idea, nice-looking sceneries.
❌ DISLIKED: Bad controls for a PC game (swipe your mouse to fly and attack). You “can” choose whether you want to kill the bosses or spare them, but sparing them more than once triggers hard mode (= everything will one-shot you). That effectively kills any depth the game might have had because you’ll probably be killing everything just to avoid frustration. Not a good way to handle your “choices and consequences” mechanics, in my opinion. The game has some in-game achievements, but you can’t check them anywhere so that’s totally pointless. Also, I was unable to take screenshots of the game (F12 didn’t work and PrintScr just captured black screen).
🕒 ~7 hours
⭐ 28/28
⁉️ STATUS: Completed (JUN)
🕒 ~3 hours
⭐ 15/15
⁉️ STATUS: Completed
🕒 ~4 hours
⭐ 24/24
⁉️ STATUS: Completed
🕒 ~3 hours
⭐ 22/22
⁉️ STATUS: Completed
🕒 ~8 hours
⭐ 19/19
⁉️ STATUS: Completed (JUN)
✔️ LIKED: An enjoyable puzzle game, competently ported from mobile devices to PC.
❌ DISLIKED: The later levels were really hard to figure out (which isn’t really a negative thing, but I wouldn’t get anywhere without a walkthrough :D)
🕒 ~9 hours
⭐ 11/13
⁉️ STATUS: Beaten (JUN)
✔️ LIKED: The “adventure” part of the gameplay was very enjoyable (the “action” part, not so much). Kate (the protagonist) isn’t your typical Mary Sue kind of heroine, which is always a plus in my book.
❌ DISLIKED: Sometimes, Kate would keep grunting and panting as if she was taking damage even when nothing was happening, that distracted me quite a lot :D The final boss of the game is incredibly stupid and poorly designed. It’s centered around the water power that Kate obtains at the very end of the game, shortly before the boss fight. It serves no purpose whatsoever other than to frustrate players with how finicky, imprecise and hard to control it is. Add to that the somewhat laggy interface when switching weapons and the fact that you only have a short window to act after the boss is stunned, and it makes for a truly unpleasant experience. The ending was clearly rushed and offered zero conclusion (Was the ship saved? What about our buddy Scoot and the other people? And what of the Malthusians - did they survive? Do they still plan to purge humanity? Who knows!)
🕒 ~68 hours
⭐ 21/21
⁉️ STATUS: Completed
✔️ LIKED: A well done mobile port of a well done rogue-lite. Multiple classes to choose from. Has permanent progression in the form of stat/skill points and upgrades (I dislike rogue-likes with no perma progression).
❌ DISLIKED: It’s very grindy and rather tedious at first, because your character starts off really weak. When you play as Necromancer, your minions look just like the regular monsters (you’ll get used to it, but it’d be nice if they had unique designs). Basic things like minimap, quickslots and inventory upgrades are hidden in the “skill tree” and you have no way of knowing that they’re there until you get to them, so I went half-way through the game thinking it doesn’t have a minimap. Not ideal. When you move your mouse around, the screen pans a bit, that seriously took me a while to get used to.
🗒️ NOTE: This game isn’t tracked by BLAEO because “profile features limited”, even though it’s been on Steam for some 8 months and has 83 (out of 90) positive reviews. So what the fuck are the criteria if that’s still not enough? That seriously pisses me off, because it means the achievs and the 100% status isn’t counted towards my profile stats (yes, I care about those, even if it’s silly).
🕒 ~17 hours
⭐ 13/17
⁉️ STATUS: Beaten
✔️ LIKED: An alright mobile port, with gameplay mimicking the “GO” titles (Hitman GO, DeusEx GO…). Lets you draw your own graffiti. Most importantly, your graffiti is saved when you fail a level, meaning you don’t have to re-draw it.
❌ DISLIKED: The achievements on Steam are written in french for some reason. Four of the seventeen achievements are broken :/
🕒 ~12 hours
⭐ 4/17
⁉️ STATUS: Unfinished
✔️ LIKED: Multiple endings… though why would anyone want to play this thing more than once is beyond me.
❌ DISLIKED: This game is so bad! A lot of the screen is obscured by unnecessarily huge UI/HUD. Bad camera angle and the lack of camera controls doesn’t let me see much. The minimap is all sorts of fucked up: it doesn’t fit into the HUD frame where it belongs, resulting in positions of enemies and objects being displayed incorrectly. The minimap also doesn’t color-code NPC, so everyone is displayed as a red marker, whether they are friendly, neutral or hostile. The stealth is a joke - you “sneak” by walking really slowly and praying for the best (there is a crouch button, but you can’t move while crouching). One of the three characters has a stealth perk that gives you up to 10 seconds of invisibility, but it has a horribly long cooldown so prepare to wait around A LOT if you wanna take the stealthy approach. The melee knockdowns are hilariously poorly implemented - you press the corresponding button, your character walks around the enemy for a bit and then decides whether (s)he will perform the action or not. I’m not kidding, it’s really that bad. Shooting is similarly unreliable. There’s just no way this game was ever playtested before release.
🗒️ NOTE: It was brought to my attention that there was some sort of a religious controversy that took place in a real-life Westboro. This game isn’t connected to that at all. Figured that’s a useful bit of info to point out ;)
Oh look what I stumbled upon! I’ve been out of town and not keeping tabs on things here, so I’ve missed a number of updates I might have otherwise commented on.
- Yeah, Anoxemia looked like one of those kind of interesting-looking games that would probably end up being too annoying to finish, so I skipped it. Looks like I don’t need to revise that decision.
- Crow looked like an interesting game that I just haven’t had a chance to play yet. Looks like I shouldn’t bump it up in the priority list. But I still like bird/flying games (e.g., Copoka, Lantern).
- Wow, you were quite the Demon Huntress this month! :3 I’ve played 2 and 3, and won 4 not too long ago, so will be played soon. I don’t know why I apparently deleted the first one from my library. Maybe I thought it had broken achievements? I’m saddened to see that you didn’t write out detailed plot summaries, impressions, pros/cons, and character analysis for all four games. Or perhaps pretty much all HOGs are like any other, and this wasn’t perceived as necessary? ;)
- We’ve talked a little about Hydrophobia: Prophecy before. I’m glad you got through it– and apparently even found all collectibles! I wasn’t necessarily planning to attempt that achievement as there are so many of them and it’s all or nothing. Or was it easier than it sounds to get them all? Did you try the Challenge Room at all? Was it a quick Nope? And ugh, everything I’ve seen indicates that the boss fight is awful. I already tend not to like many boss fights where you have to die 100 times figuring out the boss’s patterns, how it can be damaged, what attacks you have to avoid and how, etc. I never did attempt this game during the water theme (I played SOMA instead with my solo gaming time).
Sorry for all of the questions! Hope you’ve been having a good week! :)
I’ve been out of town
Welcome back then! :D
Yes, you were absolutely right about Anoxemia. I fully support your decision to never touch it :D
Crow isn’t actually all that bad; it’s rather easy (if you don’t trigger the hard mode) and pretty short, no Steam achievs so no extra frustraion for the completionists. I wouldn’t recommend it as a game you should play asap, but it’s alright enough if it fits some future monthly theme. Of course, that’s just my opinion and you might end up loving it :)
Demon Hunters, I didn’t write anything about those games because I don’t think there’s anything worth pointing out. They’re HOGs, they’re pretty much what you’d expect :D Nothing innovative or groundbreaking, no major flaws. What I can say about this series is that for some reason, I really disliked Demon Hunter: Chronicles From Beyond the first time I played it. I think it was the “complete 3 hidden object scenes in 10 minutes” thing - I thought it wanted me to rush through the beginning of the game, but it turned out to mean that your time spent on 3 consecutive HO scenes must be less than 10 minutes, which is of course perfectly doable.
Well, I followed a guide for the collectibles in Hydrophobia, but it’s a linear game so a lot of them were scattered along the way. Although some of the documents were found by scanning random walls, I don’t think anybody would find those without a guide O.o Oh, the challenge room… I didn’t try that. After the boss, I was so glad it’s over that I completely forgot :D You know what though, dying isn’t really a problem with Hydrophobia’s boss. Your HP will be mostly fine as her attacks are easy to see and hide from. It’s running out of bullets (you can only stun it with one type of ammo) and controlling the stupid water ability that’s the problem.
Then again, I’m not a skilled gamer so you might find the battle much less annoying than I made it sound (unlikely, but possible :D ).
Have a great week yourself, and good luck with whatever game you decide to play next :)
Yeah if there are ever any bird, animal, or flying/flight themes I’ll probably try Crow.
I think I must have skipped Demon Hunter 1 because of the timed achievements with fairly low completion rates, and tons of collectibles, which would probably require a guide to make sure I didn’t miss one and require a replay…and I have plenty of other HOGs to play that don’t require speed or guides.
I always run out of bullets because I have terrible aim and fire indiscriminately.
I started playing 39 Steps for the monthly theme (predominantly red logo on BLAEO, but not so much on Steam store page, hmm). And I’m still playing Monkey Island 2 with the kids. But I do hope to play Subsurface Circular and maybe a hacking game before the month is out.
predominantly red logo on BLAEO, but not so much on Steam store page, hmm
I noticed that with some games in my backlog, too O.o That mildly annoyed me, as I tried to only pick games with A LOT of red, and the non-red Steam thumbnails didn’t go with that idea.
39 Steps was a pretty ok game as far as I remember, was pleasantly surprised when I played it because I got it for free from some mass giveaway :)
Maybe I’ll start with the guide for the collectibles, and just abandon it if I miss one or just get tired of it. :p
Sounds like a solid plan hehe :D Myself, I always use guides for collectibles (I swear, it would kill me if I skipped some collectible somewhere!) so I’m used to playing while keeping an eye on a guide :)
I actually had Westboro wishlisted. Interesting to hear it has such problems.
Is stealth actually the encouraged way to play or just an option?
I had it wishlisted before, too. Thought it’d be a good game, how wrong I was! :D
You know, everything about the game is so flawed that it’s honestly hard to tell what the “encouraged way to play” is. All I know is, the character I picked is the only one with the stealth perk and she has the lowest HP, so one would say stealth is the way to go with her.
Sad to hear. I didn’t even notice the weird perspective until you brought it up. What’s that? Oblique projection or something?