September - Week 2 Update

This week’s progress isn’t half as impressive at the last, but I did manage to get quite a few games done still. For this week I’ve decided to focus mainly on my backlog, which means no free games - I’ve done a lot of those last week and I don’t really need to do them anymore. So this week has been all about directly chipping into my backlog.. and some broken promises.

I managed to finish 11 games this week, which includes two refinishes (previously 100%’d games with recently added achievements). The majority of these games aren’t necessarily hard, just a little time consuming and skill-dependent. But they’re directly in my backlog, so that’s progress! Below is my progress for this week.

Completed Games

• ADventure Lib
  

  4 hours playtime

  10 of 10 achievements

• Home is Where One Starts...
  

  5 hours playtime

  8 of 8 achievements

• Impossible Quest
  

  13 hours playtime

  4 of 4 achievements

• Planet Driller
  

  8 hours playtime

  15 of 15 achievements

• Rituals
  

  2 hours playtime

  7 of 7 achievements

• Shmadow
  

  6 hours playtime

  8 of 8 achievements

• Space Codex
  

  80 minutes playtime

  7 of 7 achievements

• Viscera Cleanup Detail: Shadow Warrior
  

  6 hours playtime

  2 of 2 achievements

• Party Hard
  

  31 hours playtime

  27 of 27 achievements

• SAMOLIOTIK
  

  9 hours playtime

  14 of 14 achievements

Let’s start off with Adventure LIB, which is quite literally the worst game on this list. The entire time I was playing the game, all I wanted to do was close and uninstall it. Like seriously, the only thing that was keeping me from doing that was that I already gotten an achievement, and I wasn’t going to let my backlog take another unfinished game. The game relies on cheap, stupid humor to keep it’s players entertained, and failed miserably. It’s ‘humor’ is literally just swapping NPC sprites with random objects that are re-generated every time you start a new game, resulting in apparently hilarious in-game objectives, such as having to fight a giant floating butter block and getting a quest to unclog the princess. It was entertaining for maybe 30 seconds before it got tiring to play because the game gets so goddamn confusing due to the shuffled sprites. Oh and the voice acting is perhaps one of the worst I’ve seen in a game, in which at one point made me genuinely wonder if it was recorded in a bathroom.

Moving on to Home is Where One Starts…, which is, thankfully, a much better game. I actually liked it quite a lot. In fact, the header of this post comes from the game. It’s a very atmospheric first-person exploration game, reminiscent of Gone Home. I can’t say much about the game without spoiling the game, but really, it was quite interesting to watch the character’s story unravel as you progress. I wouldn’t be surprised if many people found this game boring, though - it can be. There’s no fast walk option, which means you have to walk through the fairly large map at a normal walking speed.. which frankly irritated the hell out of me. I also spent at least 15 minutes looking for a stupid flask, which turns out to be somewhere in the upper right of the house, deep in the forests near the edge of the map (in case you were wondering). I wish I’d taken a screenshot to show you all where to find it. Thankfully, walking over the flask triggers a story, so you’ll know when you walk over it and (probably) won’t miss it.

Impossible Quest, the third game on my list, was a rather easy game, but god damn.. it was VERY time consuming. It’s a text based game so you just click through it, but thing is you have to do that nearly 100 times to get all the achievements - and hell, they worth less than 2 points on AStats. It probably wouldn’t be bad if the stories you have to click through is short, or even had an undo button, but noooo, a lot of the endings actually require over 10 clicks to get. That probably don’t sound too bad, until you take into account that you have to do that at least 80 times. And that’s not even counting the mistakes you’ll inevitably make along the way, forcing you to redo the steps as you descend into the dark void that is madness. Lord have mercy.

The next game on the list is Planet Driller, which si quite surprisingly a pretty decent game! It’s not exactly amazing, but it definitely was quite entertaining.. if you ignore the small glitches. It’s basically like Minecraft, but with spaceships. You use the spaceships to dig into the ground. And the biggest spaceship that I had was literally too fat to get into the ground. Which was actually probably for the best, because after forcing it in and finally succeeding, I found out that the biggest yoit spaceship is, the more likely you are to die, rendering those expensive and apparently effective fat spaceships useless. There are lava blocks scattered in the ground, and when your spaceship is four blocks wide you’re just hitting everything. I died on my fat spaceship about 8 seconds into the ground. It was amazing.

Rituals is an interesting 3D puzzle-exploration-adventure, which is actually pretty scary at first. You start in a large abandoned office with a lot of dark corners. The entire time I was in that building I was absolutely terrified by the possibility of some stupid ass ghost hiding behind a desk and jumpscaring me. Then I finally got to the lift, and as I struggled to keep a positive mind I thought, “Hey, maybe there are actually people on this floor,” and god damn it I was wrong. Things got WORSE. The lift literally takes you to some creepy forest with a creepy shack and a super creepy pitch black bear tunnel or whatever that was. I wanted to cry. I hate horror games. But things got a little better from there on. Just kidding, it didn’t. The only person I met killed himself, and I had to get some tools from a creepy empty shower room. With a lot of shower stalls. AND INTERACTABLE CURTAINS. I had to open literally every single shower stall before I even considered getting the tool because since the tool was placed on the very end of the shower stalls, I’d pick it up and see a bloody eyed ghost or whatever. This isn’t even a horro game but my mind kept going crazy with the paranoia. Bless.

On a less creepy note but not really, Shmadow is a game where you.. I don’t know, control some sort of light and then shoot some stuff in pitch darkness. Every time you get hit you’re less bright, and the map gets darker. Thankfully the game was pretty easy, and I actually enjoyed it quite a lot. There’s something very therapeutic about being the only shining light in pitch darkness, and something artistic about the light gradually growing weaker as the darkness consumes it. Mmmm.

Space Codex is a game that I’ve wanted for quite a while, and I was lucky enough to win it on Steam Gifts last week! I installed and completed right away. The gameplay itself is just like Shmadow, but there are less darkness and more harmful objects flying around the map. And some suicidal enemy ships that keeps crashing into you on purpose. God damn it, I hate those. But the game was actually quite easy for the most part.

The eight game on my list, Sparkle Zero, is a Spore meets agar.io. You basically play as a bacteria that eats some.. cubes? And other bacterias, of course. You are practically the only hostile bacteria in the game though. But Jesus that took me a long while to figure out. I spent the first 30 minutes running away from a bunch of small bacterias I thought was a gigantic, hostile bacteria. But noo they’re just tiny stupid triangles, I didn’t realize it because they keep making some scary ass alien noises. I basically spent the first half of the game getting chased around by my own prey. Not like it’s my fault though, the game has literally no tutorial. Seriously. The developers even proudly wrote it on the game’s store page. “Before you play Sparkle ZERO please be aware that this game contains no tutorial. You will be left to explore the world alone, learning to climb the evolutionary ladder.” Fantastic!

Viscera Cleanup Detail: Shadow Warrior is the ninth and last game I officially finished this week. I was actually gonna use a screenshot from the game as a header for this post, but decided to go for Home is Where One Starts.. instead, because of the amount of gore in it. I figured that maybe not everyone would be comfortable seeing blood. It’s a fantastic game though, just like every other Viscera Cleanup Detail game. I spent at least 3 hours in the game, which was actually much, much longer than it should have taken. The guide I followed gave a tip that would allow me to finish it in 10 min tops, which is cheating. You enter some code and just kinda violently look at everything? I don’t know. But I did use a cheat code that basically cleans everything around your character to clean some unreachable blood stains on the walls and other odd places to ensure I get the 100% clean achievement thing. I cleaned at least 99% of the map manually though.

One of the two re-finishes on this list is Party Hard, which saw the addition of a new map and a new character about three days ago. The map is called ‘Old Castle’ and the character is some sort of Van Helsing dude? The map was pretty tough though. No useful traps and 61 guests in a big map. And guests you kill will resurrect if you don’t apply holy water to them. This game is also one of the reasons why this weekly update was posted late, because I was too busy posting a long ass super detailed guide on getting this achievement on both AStats. This is my guide, in case you need it: https://goo.gl/9s85in (AStats) and https://goo.gl/uMMgsL (Steam). Upvotes are very appreciated!

SAMOLIOTIK comes up next, as the second re-finish and also the last game on this list. It’s a neat little game that could overwhelm you, but the glitch made the extra achievement super easy. As it turns out, you can still move your ship when you pause the game, enabling you to get the necessary popups with zero risk (unless you deliberate crash yourself into enemies). Feels good to have another perfect game back!

Started Games

• Octodad: Dadliest Catch
  

  9 hours playtime

  0 of 32 achievements

• Papers, Please
  

  7 hours playtime

  13 of 13 achievements

• Dungeon of Zolthan
  

  7 hours playtime

  0 of 13 achievements

I started three new games this week, two of those I haven’t gotten any achievements in. The first of those two games is Octodad: Dadliest Catch, which was as you can imagine, a fantastic game! Also very frustrating. And boring, because it’s old and I feel like I’ve played it before. But it’s a very entertaining game, and I’m looking forward to play more of it in the future!

The second is Papers, Please, which I bought thanks to the Youtuber jacksepticeye, who I’ve been watching more and more recently. He played the game on one of his videos, and I checked it on the Steam store only to find out that it was on sale.. and you know what happens next. It’s a great game, although it feels quite taxing to play sometimes. But I like it. A lot. That one guy who keeps returning despite being rejected entry like half a dozen times is my favorite. I hope there’ll be a nice story for him in the end.

Dungeon of Zolthan is the next game on this list, and also the only one I’ve actually progressed in achievements-wise. The game itself isn’t really all that hard, but boy the achievements are. The first four achievements I focused in were the “Defeat [Boss] without getting hit” achievements, which pretty fine the most part. The achievements I need though, can be pretty hard to tackle. One of them is to complete the game with 5 or less deaths which I’m not sure if I’ll ever get. But I’ll try to get it anyway, because how bad can it be, really?

.. I’m going to regret that last sentence aren’t I.

Summary

So far this has been a pretty productive week for backlog killing! It’s such a shame that it was stained by a broken promise as I didn’t start Tropico 4 or progressed in Tales of Maj’Eyal like I originally planned and said I would. I’m obviously going to start and progress in them eventually, though I fear that it might not be soon. Life has been taking over and there are some issues that have been escalating big time and getting out of hand (ongoing legal battle), hence the lateness of this update. I actually haven’t even started or progressed in anything for this third week (18-24 Sept) as I’ve had very, very little time to actually sit down and play.

I do, however, plan to play some stuff in the last few days of this week. The majority of them will be played casually though (with little focus on the achievements), as I’m usually very exhausted these days and don’t really have the energy for achievement hunting. It’s really a shame considering how well this month was going, but gaming won’t be a top priority for some time now. Things may pick up sometimes next week, and I hope they do, but it probably won’t be enough to warrant an update so I’ll be skipping the update for Week 3 and go directly to Week 4, unless I miraculously complete a bunch of games out of the blue.

Anyway, thank you so much for reading! I really, really appreciate it. See you all again soon, and happy backlog killing!