Monthly Report - August 2020

Won : We Were Here Together
Free : F1 2018
From bundles/gifts/sales : American Fugitive, Little Big Workshop, Genesis Alpha One, Hello Neighbor, Hello Neighbor: Hide and Seek, Call of Cthulhu, Through The Darkest of Times, Vampyr

Graveyard Keeper

88 hours playtime

83 of 83 achievements

Graveyard Keeper - completed

I loved the game and got the Stranger Sins DLC during the last sale, so I loaded my save again and continued managing my graveyard… Well to be honest I did not do much graveyard things… I mostly created a few zombies to automate things, I probably didn’t even enter the graveyard :).
It’s a little sad, but was really graveyard keeper about graveyard keeping ? :). In the DLC, you start managing a tavern ! So it is a lot more focused on farming and producing food.
I liked that because in the “main” game, I felt that although you could produce a lot of different dishes, you weren’t really doing it. I had a few dishes that I was producing a lot to restore my energy and that’s it, usually nothing really complicated. So this DLC pushes you to diversify and try things.
Besides the tavern, you are given a lot of fetch quests to gather components that allows you to discover the History of this world and information about several key characters. This is interesting, but maybe a little too “fetchy”. You sometimes have to cross the map several times for not really interesting reasons. I would have liked to explore the dungeon again for instance, instead of just running around.
Not the best DLC, but overall a nice addition and a good reason to play the game again..

Achievements : Most achievements are linked to the story progression, but a few are linked to achieving organizing a “perfect” event (by serving the right dishes). To be honest, after a few testing, I had to look at the wiki. It would have been nice to a have a few clues about which dishes fit which event, I didn’t felt it was always very logical, and it can be a lot of work to organize an event, so it is a bit annoying to “waste” it trying to find the right dishes (at some point money isn’t really a factor)…

We Were Here Together

7 hours playtime

22 of 22 achievements

We Were Here Together - completed

I won this one on SteamGift, and as it was on Humble Monthly, I got a copy for a friend with whom I enjoyed a lot the previous games (We Were Here & We Were Here Two).
Like the other ones, this is a asymmetric puzzle game and as expected this one was nice too. A few puzzles forced us to take notes, that’s always good :).
This is very similar to the other games, a few puzzles are similar to the previous ones, but often with a setup different enough that you don’t feel they just repeat their puzzles, and a couple of them are more challenging.
We also liked that this time you spent a good amount of time together, and you are only separated later. But this time, you don’t have the same story depending on the path you are, which makes replaying it even more interesting.
A very good game to play with a friend !

Achievements : You just have to play the game twice, once for each side (which you would have probably done anyway, right? ^^), and the final chapter twice too. Thanksfully, you can choose your chapter so it is quite quick to do.

Algotica Iterations

6 hours playtime

7 of 7 achievements

Algotica Iterations - completed

This game sucks. Avoid it.
.
.
Ok. I won this on SteamGift and was quite interested by the concept. As a computer programmer, I love games that “gamify” programming, and like to see how people can make it more friendly. So I liked the idea.
I think I played it right away, I played it until a part where the game opens up to some sort of open world, it wasn’t really finished but was promising, I feel that I still had a few things to do. As the developer said he was working on a remaster, I decided to wait for it and stopped there.
I forgot this game for a few years and as I was looking for a small game to play on holidays, I decided to replay it.
And well… The game is still very buggy (I’m pretty sure more), some graphics change are strange, I think several levels were removed, and the open world part disappeared. A “story” has been added, but it’s uninteresting and useless. And I’m pretty sure it is easier.
What annoyed me the most is a bug when you try to manipulate the instructions and the game just delete / overwrite / reorder instructions. This is the core loop. One wrong instruction and you sometimes have to reset the whole program because the drag & drop didn’t work properly and messed up the program. Without this, maybe the game would get a “meh” comment from me. But it annoyed me so much, than it gets the “it sucks” :).
So, as a remaster, you have a worse game, shorter, with less content, and the developer is still selling it… I’m happy that I didn’t pay for that.

Achievements : This kind of game can have interesting & hard achievements (like Human Resource Machine does), pushing you to find optimized/smart solutions. This one doesn’t. You try to optimize on the first few levels, and then you see it is useless. Just play the game, complete the few levels there is, and it’s done.

Don't Starve Together

7 hours playtime

no achievements

Don't Starve Together - unfinished

I started to play this one with a friend. Neither of us played the single player so we were both discovering the game…
And boy this is hard. After a few tries, I went reading a few guides to understand what we were doing wrong. And it was really helpful ! That and a few utility mods.
The game is still hard, and it is impressive how much you can do in it. I’m not the kind of gamer that invest a lot of time getting good at one specific game, so I don’t think I’ll become good at this one, but the few hours we played were quite fun, and we’ll probably play it again in the future.
I’ll write a more complete review then.

Achievements : No achievements.