A terrible June for videogames (not.. really)

though in truth, I disliked the games a bit more than I did enjoy playing them this month.
Octodad being the best and Maize being an odd second because it’s half boring and half somewhat charming (a little). Layers of Fear being somewhere around there, too.

Knytt Underground could have been a lot more enjoyable but it was plagued with what I think as of pointless padding and having to maneuver across the map without being able to teleport to a previous saved location to skip all walking you already did.

• Knytt Underground
  

  24 hours playtime

  18 of 20 achievements

• Maize
  

  5 hours playtime

  no achievements

• Octodad: Dadliest Catch
  

  11 hours playtime

  32 of 32 achievements

• Shelter 2
  

  5 hours playtime

  5 of 26 achievements

• Ryse: Son of Rome
  

  10 hours playtime

  27 of 73 achievements

• Layers of Fear
  

  21 hours playtime

  27 of 27 achievements

• Sid Meier's Pirates!
  

  6 hours playtime

  no achievements

Knytt Underground: My biggest gripe is how Episode 3 is really huge compared to Episode1+2 (which were more tutorials), but the lack of being able to quickly travel to another specified location all the way across the map each time instead of WALKIN’ pads on to the time. I just figured since I’ve already travelled across and filled most of the dumb map I could skip doing it again since it’s a videogame.

Slight spoiler for travel
because there is actual ‘quick travel’ in the Disorder, but unless you’ve played the game or remember where these areas are on the map are you’re just randomly teleporting and not choosing where you end up. Despite it being intended by the developer it is entirely dumb for the player to try to make use of generally unless you want to waste the limited crystals used to enter the Disorder or like to quit and reload so you don’t lose them if you make a mistake and waste one. You can buy a few more with coins, but you also have the choice to use coins to pay the bellguard to open the path (the main goal of the game basically) as you have 4 bells to pay for. So around 8 coins out of 27 if you find them all.

Somewhat more minor spoilers about travel, but more of a disdain for the travel
You only have a minute to explore in the Disorder and the screen continues to grow darker in the Disorder as each second passes. If you stand on the object that lets you go in the Disorder in the Disorder you can brighten up the screen again a bit, but it still goes dark fairly quick. You’re limited to what you can even see after 3 or 4 rooms, and so your ‘quick travel’ is almost still blind as to where you may end up. I usually would like to go all the way across the map but I end up a dozen rooms in the next direction and then walking the rest of the way.

I suppose my biggest gripe with it is as an exploration game, I didn’t really have fun exploring (nor felt value in finding anything) and there are too many rooms which serve, barely, any purpose except to make your journey that much more longer It was definitely intentional that the items you find aren’t rewarding, but I’m just putting my personal thoughts ahead of developer intentions. Plus having to walk through all the rooms, that are mostly empty, back and forth, sometimes, downs the experience and made it feel like a major waste of time. I think the game is.. pretty fun in some ways, but I just look towards most of the wasted time having to walk through areas I had already been as a major con, though.

For a rant, there are 1440 (48x30) rooms that are visible on the main map (slight spoilers if you like finding achievements yourself or finding hidden rooms yourself). Most areas often make you zig zag to get back to where you want, so you’re often going through several rooms near the end of the game just to get across the map. Going from a corner to the next… and just pretending on average of a room being 8(?) seconds to get through and we can pretend it’s maybe 200 rooms to suffer through to turn back. A random 25 minutes to kill. It’s a lot more if you like to check out every room as you might stop in the middle and turn in a new direction and then later retrace your steps back.

It’s a bit funny to think checking every room by walking through it to take around 4 hours. Assuming a very minimum amount of time spent in each, but the trickier rooms are repeat attempts with several deaths. It really adds to the time simple spent trying to move across the map.

I’ll finish the last two achievements later tonight though one should be from the secret ending and should unlock from watching the ending scene.. fully.

Raiden IV: OverKill: Ah, you beautiful bastard. I can’t even run the game because it crashes and after looking into a few solutions.. I gave up. So I may never play this one… for a while. So let’s put it on here.. anyway. I’d like to play it, but I don’t think I want to try to troubleshoot. I heard some problems with usb connected (controller) devices, but I just am not in the mood to unplug everything to test it right now. I don’t have many usb devices plugged in, though.
edit: apparently it was this GC/N64 usb adapter* being plugged in that caused the crash, so I guess it is now moved down to my play queue. I really wonder why it can cause the game to crash, though.

Maize: Between boring and somewhat amusing with slight charm (very little) because the STUPID IDIOT and STUPID repeated a bit much for my liking. The beginning was rather bleak and boring and it added some life after that, but.. you are still walking looking for random objects to solve puzzles with until the next life of the game kicks in. It is not that long, at least, but it felt like it at some parts. As a guilty pleasure, I did like this game in the end a bit.. ignoring the dumb random objects you find and putting them in the outlined area as puzzles.

Octodad: Dadliest Catch: I finished the prequel (though it’s more like a demo since it was a student project, I believe) and then set off for this. Quirky dialogue and blurbs from the Dadliest.. I had my fun and only suffered when I wanted to do a few of the achievements as I endured the controls along with a few ties that were annoying.

Shelter 2: I was really disappointed by this game and entirely bored as it is, to me, pretty shallow and repetitive (as a game), but likely good enough to show.. the life of a mother.. Lynx and her cubs? It’s still a videogame, though. I enjoyed the first one much more but because I liked ‘level’ progression more and something that ended. It had 5 levels and you didn’t have to run around in the same or slightly same scene if you moved to another region.

Shelter 2 is mainly finding food, feeding food, avoiding danger if you have the DLC to visit the mountains or taking the hawk down that tries to eat your cub and all of that all over again. In an open world. A world too open that is just like the outside (but not as interesting), but in a game it is boring and unappealing without variety or anything to really do, but I know you’re just an animal.. but it just wasn’t fun.

Ryse: Son of Rome: I.. didn’t quite enjoy this game and I’m not too sure why. It may have just felt a bit too mindless to play for me. It’s not a mindless hack and slash, and you need to time some attacks especially for executions, but it just wasn’t a game I thought was fun to play in the end.

Layers of Fear: I enjoyed this game, and I would have enjoyed it more if I had looked closer at some of the achievements to cut down on the time I replayed it. The game has jump scares, though, and it jumped me a few times with the sudden strong noises a few too many. I feel it’s often hard to judge games if I were to recommend them, so I never bother with real details.. like this one. It’s more the experience than what the story likely is offering (which wasn’t something I’d bother to recommend over) and I guess it’s still interesting to see what his or her story is even if it’s not interesting once you find out.

If anyone plays and likes achievements, I would look up The Tree and the Apple for the DLC so you can get it done because you have to collect and do everything and side with the father more than the mother. Just to avoid replaying it, at least. Playing through the base game is pretty fast once you just want to finish if you’re going to see the other endings, or do achievements, or when there’s no need to look or explore anymore.. it’s just.. pretty quick to get through.

Sid Meier’s Pirates!: With this game’s slow sailing that padded more time to the game than I cared to want to spend, I started to wonder how exactly you could finish this game. After looking up how I discovered it is up to you.. and so I lost against a pirate miserably (unintentionally) and retired from the pirate life. Not exactly my type of game, but I still managed to play it to a somewhat filled ending, at least, but I read nothing really makes a difference; it’s just your rank that changes in the end when you retire which is where you can have an ending.

Future Fun filled Queue

• SteamWorld Heist
  

  5 minutes playtime

  0 of 47 achievements

• Event[0]
  

  0 minutes playtime

  0 of 12 achievements

• Oxenfree
  

  89 minutes playtime

  0 of 13 achievements

• Cornerstone: The Song Of Tyrim
  

  0 minutes playtime

  0 of 12 achievements

• Raiden IV: OverKill
  

  3 minutes playtime

  0 of 47 achievements

Steamworld Heist A game I feel like having a change of pace to play for now and hopefully something I can play in short sessions instead of trying to rush myself to finish a game for a change.

event[0] Appealing because I think the game is likely 6 or so hours max, so it will be easier to simply finish with that in mind. Not too sure if I will find the premise as interesting as I play through it, though. Lonely spaceship computer…

Oxenfree I think I’ll finally finish restart this game I won that I probably should have finished months ago, but I really enjoyed the little I played of it so I wanted to sort of hold off on it.. plus I sidetrack myself looking around and it looked like you could walk to look at all the places if you want to. I hope there is no reason to explore or dialogue from looking at objects so I can just finish the game instead, though.

Cornerstone: The Song Of Tyrim Something that is just in my win queue that I hope is not terrible.

Raiden IV: OverKill You are above.

the
end

So what fun games are YOU playing next?

More May, but.. it’s June now.

• The Magic Circle
  

  11 hours playtime

  14 of 14 achievements

• Shelter
  

  4 hours playtime

  no achievements

• Stories: The Path of Destinies
  

  18 hours playtime

  37 of 37 achievements

• Mini Metro
  

  5 hours playtime

  18 of 38 achievements

• The Flame in the Flood
  

  18 hours playtime

  17 of 36 achievements

The Magic Circle: the meta game. kind of entertaining, but really short (3-4 hours). I played more just to achieve.. pointless.. achievements. I think I still had the most fun with this game than the rest.
edit: for achievement hunters, make sure to Edit all the objects/monsters your first time going through so you don’t have to hunt them later (all you have to do is go inside the mind for it to count)

shelter: it was entertaining enough for me and eventually I just let it run to finish off a stupid card drop. I hated when I lost my badger babies.. so I restarted it a few times. I hope the DLC goes on sale so I can play its sequel.
I looked at the other mode it unlocks when you finish but it has 0 appeal to me. I don’t want to log in each day just to play it. I read about what happens and that was good enough for me. I only finished it so I could start Shelter 2 but it has DLC I figured I’d rather play with than not play so I skipped it. I still enjoyed the game, though, but the first level shortly bored me and I was wondering if the entire game would be the same.

Mini Metro: not exactly the type of game I like so I just finished each basic map and considered it complete.

Stories: The Path of Destinies: gets dull once you, if this is you, want to see the rest of the stories in the game because it can be very repetitive, yet very short. each story run is very short once you’ve done your exploring and realize nothing exists to find. some levels have some scrolls that are written by some of the game characters if you open the locked doors with the other swords.
each run for a story is 25 minutes or so, but the worst part is sometimes the game does not let you skip (developers, why..) some scenes, like the very start of the GAME, each time you are going to replay.

The Flame in the Flood: minimal story, maximum resource gathering and use and rafting down a long river. I finished this but then noticed the month changed by 10 minutes.

Future future queue

• Octodad: Dadliest Catch
  

  0 minutes playtime

  0 of 32 achievements

• Sid Meier's Pirates!
  

  0 minutes playtime

  no achievements

• Layers of Fear
  

  0 minutes playtime

  0 of 27 achievements

• Cornerstone: The Song Of Tyrim
  

  0 minutes playtime

  0 of 12 achievements

• Oxenfree
  

  89 minutes playtime

  0 of 13 achievements

• Ryse: Son of Rome
  

  0 minutes playtime

  0 of 73 achievements

Oxenfree is a game I really want to play, yet I keep stalling it for some reason. It’s likely because I like exploring and it sidetracks so much in a game that it will waste (more) time and I will probably look around until I realize there is no point to it and then focus on just the main story.
Octodad might be short enough so I can play the first and then the sequel. They seem like silly games, and hopefully not incredibly frustrating with the controls.
Sid Meier’s Pirates! is also strangely appealing because it feels like an odd game I’d usually never look into to play myself. Seems a bit long though.

Purely just looking at playing my SteamGifts wins for now still and those 3 are hovering around what I want to start next, I think.

Games.. I’ve probably finished throughout the month of May.

• Little King's Story
  

  68 hours playtime

  25 of 41 achievements

• The Last Door - Collector's Edition
  

  8 hours playtime

  14 of 16 achievements

• Gunmetal Arcadia Zero
  

  2 hours playtime

  9 of 11 achievements

• The Beginner's Guide
  

  2 hours playtime

  no achievements

• Slime-san
  

  12 hours playtime

  25 of 53 achievements

• Metrico+
  

  8 hours playtime

  1 of 18 achievements

</li>
• Tiny Barbarian DX
  

  6 hours playtime

  11 of 27 achievements

• Insanity's Blade
  

  6 hours playtime

  15 of 34 achievements

Little King’s Story I actually did enjoy this game more than I show it. I wrote a negative review for it anyway for anyone with an entirely unknown interest in it. I really did hate the pinball boss and the mountain one (which had very slight bugs that made it annoying, but not impossible). Proper party with high HP can truly change from “what a headache” to “very easy” though.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/Anatil/recommended/390310

The Last Door - Collector’s Edition I truly enjoyed this game. I don’t think it’s anything amazing but it was worth playing to me. It at least keeps up its creepy atmosphere throughout the game, but I wasn’t exactly taken in by its story. I guess I enjoyed something more from it that I can’t quite seem to say. The second game was on sale, so I just picked it up (yes, I’m terrible for still buying off Steam) to show a tiny bit of support.

I wonder if Season 2 will finish up the events or if they want to keep going. I still have the minisodes from this to play, though, and I was going through the achievements since I was enjoying it.

Gunmetal Arcadia Zero Fairly short game, and that was enough to not keep it from getting too repetitive. The boss fights are really bad, though, to the point you can just abuse a few. One you can just sword hop on its back until you kill it. Still enjoyed it for the most part, but I really wonder how their next game (which is a prequel) deals with boss fights.
Makes it easier for the speedrun achievements, at least.

The Beginner’s Guide Surprised me that it’s actually rather depressing, or I felt it was. Was entertaining (which feels harsh to use) to play a game that was mostly a person just telling you about a very specific part of their life compared to a usual game. Barely a spoiler, but it’s mostly if you just want to be completely surprised without knowing anything. It’s so short, you may as well find out as you play.

Slime-san It was.. easy to play, and a slight bit difficult to finish. I’m not really a fan of this genre and I hope I don’t try to play any others. This one only had 100 levels (about 4 rooms each) so it was quick to play through with small sessions. Some of the music is pretty cool.. chiptune again, though.

Metrico+ Hm.. this one had me slightly puzzled a few times. Was a bit bland for most of the game that I just tabbed out on and off adding 2 more hours to the game..

Slightly more challenging near the end. I blanked on some of the solutions and gave up on one just to get through the game. I should have figured it out, though.

Tiny Barbarian DX I technically finished the game… but the game is only half complete. I won this 3 years ago, though, so I imagine the person or people that made this have some struggles to not have fixed this. I really enjoyed the boss fights in this but I really did not enjoy the stages. I think they are mostly boring in appearance and boring to play through.

Chiptune fans might enjoy it more, but the music is pretty good, I thought.

https://jeffball.bandcamp.com/track/cliffside-morning-wood
This song really reminded me of some popular r&b (?) song that had radio play, or maybe something else. 00:07 to 00:19 is the exact part that reminded me of how similar it sounded. It wasn’t a song I listened to, but only overheard enough to be be reminded of it.

Insanity’s Blade The current game I am playing through and almost to the beaten state. Rather enjoyable except I put it on Manly (which is the the 3rd out of 4th difficulty) and Stage 2 took me hours to get through. A bit from losing life and a bunch from getting killed by the timed death thwomps (spikes) that kill you instantly if it drops on you. Eventually it was just the boss with a laser eye that does deadly damage or maybe one shots you with it. Not hard to dodge, but when you don’t know the pattern you usually die a few times and repeat again.

I learned the hallway the hard way by eventually forcing myself to go slow once I remembered the area with the timed death spikes that come down, but hide completely instead of being shown. You can simply proceed as if nothing is around to kill you instantly and show up at a bad time where the spikes aren’t in view and face a death just being unaware of the death traps around. Just a bit annoying. Feels like a pointless addition with death obstacles, but mostly annoying if you game over and spend the 30 or so seconds going through the menu each time to load your game again.

It could have just given you the option to load your save once you game over, but I guess it wanted to emulate 90s videogames that just game over you to the menu.

Future queue for my most appealing (I think) wins

• Stories: The Path of Destinies
  

  0 minutes playtime

  0 of 37 achievements

• Oxenfree
  

  89 minutes playtime

  0 of 13 achievements

• The Magic Circle
  

  0 minutes playtime

  0 of 14 achievements

• Shelter
  

  0 minutes playtime

  no achievements

• Shelter 2
  

  0 minutes playtime

  0 of 26 achievements

• The Flame in the Flood
  

  0 minutes playtime

  0 of 36 achievements

• Mini Metro
  

  0 minutes playtime

  0 of 38 achievements

• Ryse: Son of Rome
  

  0 minutes playtime

  0 of 73 achievements

I’m not sure what I want to play next. I’ve mostly been going through games that I pray are short but end up putting 6 to 8 hours in anyway.

I just know I don’t want to touch anything from the bottom two rows for a while if it shows it organized the way I have it ordered.
http://backlog-deepness.rhcloud.com/lists/eb6o58b/rearrange

Stories: The Path of Destinies and Oxenfree have APG winning weight behind them. Even though I look forward to them (and was enjoying Oxenfree) I just want to mindlessly finish off some smaller and short games just to get them out of the way. Since Stories may take me 20 to 40 hours, I want to hold it off a bit more for now.

I am probably at the point of having very few short games left to play now, though.
Not too sure why I write up these posts. Maybe it will motivate random people to finish their games.

Maybe someone else can suggest the game I can go finish next while I remain undecided and do Shelter since they seem very short.

• Firewatch
  

  9 hours playtime

  10 of 10 achievements

Firewatch could probably get plenty out of me, but still with my writing in mind possibly not nearly as much. Since I won the game and had the month deadline, I was almost tempted just to wait until the last few days to play it. I started earlier and then re-read the description say finish in a month and actually thought to adjust the date to when I activated it which was like a a day or two more.

The voice acting is the highlight and the game is pretty much entirely focused around having it anyway, so I wouldn’t imagine the game to have been such a hit if it was pretty.. poor or just not as great. That’s almost all I want to say, though. The story for how Henry ended up as a ranger surprised me only because they decided to write the tragic backstory to his life (slight spoilers, but honestly barely)

There’s a story and I would say it works without giving away details so not to hint what it is about or what it isn’t. You know, a little emotional journey depending on how you feel. Had more feelings than I did for Owlboy, at least.
I enjoyed it enough without having finished it to give it back to the group I won it from, so I hope that user will enjoy it as much as I did. One thing that I expected the game to have was a bit of world to explore.. things to find or something, but it’s not that type of world. I did find a raccoon sitting on a tree stump doing something that did spark up dialogue from Delilah that wasn’t one of the achievement events, but I don’t think there’s really much else to find as everything is pretty much there as part of the game for the plot and 2 or 3 locations for achievements that also have dialogue.

Personally, it was worth the $10 but don’t play it like I did and try to explore. Just stick to the directed plot… and pick up the turtle when you find it to save your achievement hunting. One randomly shows up on the first day when I finally decided just to restart the game to go look for one on Day 2, but there it was along the way.. waiting. That last achievement took me a while to get. The game should roughly be 4-5 hours instead of my 9.

if it helps anyone, a turtle (apparently it’s a chance they spawn or something, so it could be random) was near the beginning on Day 1 when you head towards your tower, I think, and I guess it’s right near the sign where it says Trailhead.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=864396920

• bOllO
  

  15 minutes playtime

  6 of 6 achievements

This one is actually repetitive and entirely boring once you realize each level is the same +1 more hallway per level to bounce into (not my type of game. Time will be better spent on games that have more value for me. Since I only went to Level 11, the only difference I noticed was the walls start breaking down from your bounces, so there was that padded added challenge. Falsely put down as Complete, but whatever. Someone in the forums made it to Level 94 or 96 and I wonder what compelled them to.

• Titan Souls
  

  11 hours playtime

  20 of 27 achievements

I’m going to buy this game for a friend once it hits sale on Steam just as a small way of giving actual money (since I have $ in steambucks, I guess, to the devs since I enjoyed the game a lot more than I did when I played the demo. I actually finished this game and Stray Cat Crossing right after my last post or in the following day or two.

• Stray Cat Crossing
  

  4 hours playtime

  no achievements

I enjoyed LiEat a lot for some reason and the story telling is probably on a similar level, but I enjoyed this one less. Most likely because it has even fewer characters and I had no strong feelings for most of it. Plus, I did not really enjoy the ending of the game.

• Oxenfree
  

  89 minutes playtime

  0 of 13 achievements

ur next.. soon. I really want to sit and play Oxenfree but sometimes story heavy games give me a hard time to sit down and let them play even though I was having a fine time the first hour I was playing.. and the game doesn’t seem like it’s tough to play either. Just.. ME.

• English Country Tune
  

  2 hours playtime

  no achievements

For now, I want to mostly listen through my music playlist, wipe out albums I haven’t heard and play some light puzzle games that don’t need the game audio to be an experience, thoo.. to double taking games and music at the same time.
also the game is still puzzling me in some levels. I’m glad it changed up a bit so I don’t have to smash balls around since that 3d world maneuvering is confusing to get used to.

• Hidden Folks
  

  9 hours playtime

  5 of 5 achievements

Technically, I finished this game, too… but it’s unfinished. I guess the dev is going to add more levels later. I wonder if people are rebelling yet. Only good if you like Where’s Waldo, I’d say, or can HANDLE THAT. Kind of a headache when you can’t seem to find that one object somewhere, though..

dun dun nuhh… I wanted to finish more than two games and post, but I’m slow and I stopped playing Elliot Quest when I got ‘lost’ but apparently I just missed the end area of where I was and then wasted an hour exploring a bunch of maps and it felt like mindless gaming and a waste of my time (which irked me so much I stopped for a week). That’s Zelda II homage, I guess.

The game was fairly fun other than the fact I just missed the area, but it’s pretty open and just go “explore and figure out what to do” so much you can go get stuck on a mini-boss if you backtrack and you can’t actually attack it if you don’t have the boots to jump on an enemy or the rock spell (which you might get soon after the boots anyway)

• LIMBO

  6 hours playtime

  11 of 13 achievements

• Elliot Quest

  23 hours playtime

  no achievements

  </ul>

I also have +2 wins to add to my log now and -2 from finishing, and now I’ll probably play Oxenfree that I won a group soon.. after Stray Cat Crossing so I can have a change of pace from endless exploring. So I guess I’ll work on these four next and hope I win less though I don’t enter too many really. I kind of want to play Slime Rancher so I can have a mindlessly fun time, though, but.. I want to finish a few more games first.

• Stray Cat Crossing

  0 minutes playtime

  no achievements

• Titan Souls

  0 minutes playtime

  0 of 27 achievements

• The Last Door - Collector's Edition

  0 minutes playtime

  0 of 16 achievements

• Oxenfree

  0 minutes playtime

  0 of 13 achievements

</li>

Only 27% finished wins (now).. seems so low and terrible. Hmm
edit: now 29%.. with Stray Cat done. Act III’s loop is really terrible if you miss the door on the stage until you notice it.

Well, I finished Owlboy after probably a week leaving it near the end. I would not recommend it at its current price, though, but those are simply my own feelings. I thought it might have more of an emotional impact on me, but I just didn’t feel all that much for its characters or story. I think most of what I enjoyed were the Boguins in the game and they are dumb and silly :(

The gameplay was nice enough, though. Onwards.. to SG wins for a change of pace then.

• Owlboy
  

  13 hours playtime

  7 of 12 achievements

my beloved action RPG.. finished.. but this might look ugly cause I have no idea how to show the game, so I just copied its outer..html. The preview is.. so wide it is stretching.

Now for some weird reason I’m going to get dragged into a few hours or less of Deadly Premonition and then probably actually play Owlboy and then work on some of my wins here.

(how do I fix the wide stretch issue if it stretches..)
edit: it did stretch..

• Xanadu Next

  28 hours playtime

  7 of 15 achievements

Punch me in my head. I just won Styx (even though to be friendly, I split the game at a fair price at Group Buys, but still wanted it anyway)

I mostly want to play through Xanadu Next for a game right now, though, since it just (on Steam) released. I’ll probably try to play through the shorter games I’ve won from here soon enough since I think most of them are 3-4 hours.

another game won.. oh my (but I finished Battleblock Theater with someone)

oh no. I won another damn game. time for a +1 to unplayed.