April update

Agatha Christie - The ABC Murders 🎁 - completed
Point-and-click adventure with classic detective story. Game and puzzles are rather easy. Art style is nice and pleasant. Voices are fine but not always synced with lips. I’ve never read any of Agatha Christie’s book so I can’t tell how similar is the story to the original, but it had some sense in it and I liked it. Reconstruction parts were simple and very hard to fail. The biggest torture was using mouse as a controller - especially parts were you analyze items and try to rotate them 😒. Not sure why my controller didn’t work in this game.

Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box - beaten
My second attempt for this game. I liked previous installments of Burnout (played on PS2), and expected a little more from this one. The open world is nice, with a lot of shortcuts and collectibles, and there’s a lot to do, but it felt very small comparing to TDU 2 (which I’ve played recently). The soundtrack is fine, I loved cruising with classical music on. But on the other hand I was really tired with the main theme song (Paradise City). The biggest drawback here is that almost each race looks the same, there are only few finish line points so you end up racing on very similar routes all the time, so in the end I got tired of it and didn’t 100% complete it.

Doc Clock: The Toasted Sandwich of Time 🎁 - beaten
I liked the general idea of building your vehicle in this puzzle platformer. But everything seems underdone here. The physics is very basic and sometimes buggy, graphics looks like drawn in Paint and I couldn’t bother less with the story (it might be fun for a 7 yo kid though). At least the game was short.

HuniePop 🎁 - beaten
Very pervy and dirty dating sim combined with Match-3 puzzle. Storywise it’s not the worst because at least it don’t have all that save the world nonsense, you just want to pick up some girls 😛 (but there still are some fairies and aliens). Generally I don’t like this kind of games, but at least 3-Matching part was fine here.

Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days - beaten
Second try on this action game. I liked the general style with features like shaky camera and pixelation of headshots and private areas. Maybe colors where washed up too much. Mechanics-wise it goes the same almost all the time: you are being attacked, find a cover, kill dozens of enemies, move to the next area. Gets boring quickly.

Please, Don’t Touch Anything 🎁 - completed
Original puzzle game were you try to find all the possible endings. Discovering all the easter eggs and ending after ending was really fun. Not every clue was straitghforward for me, I had to use a guide to get some endings, still I enjoyed it very much. I guess that, from April set, I liked this game the most.

Also I’ve spent lots of time with Splasher 🎁 (beaten last month) trying to get medals in Time Attack and Speedrun modes.

Progress

March update

Joe Danger 2: The Movie 🎁 - beaten
My second attempt for it. I didn’t love it, but I managed to beat it. The difficulties in most levels are caused by explosions and other distractions that makes you lose focus on Joe. Final levels are variations of previous levels, but with some additional traps and more distractions. Also announcer voice gets annoying very quickly.

Alpha Runner 🎁 - completed
Buggy and poorly made endless “platform jumper”. Raw graphics, unbalanced characters (which are assigned randomly on each try), weird mini games, buggy joystick controls. Not a good game.

Rusty Lake: Roots 🎁 - completed
Point-and-click puzzle game. I really liked its black humor, story wasn’t bad too. Puzzles were mostly easy. I liked how story connects between levels. I would enjoy it much more on a smartphone or tablet, but on a PC controls were irritating without a touchscreen.

Splasher 🎁 - completed
A bit like Super Meat Boy platformer but not as hard (well except of the final level). Had a good time with it. There is no much story in it, but it’s not needed because gameplay is really fun. The graphics and music are nice too. Things I didn’t like are levels arrangement in the hub, which enforces you to make some backtracking after each level, and the insane difficulty raise in the last level. There are also speedrun and time attack modes which I am gonna pass knowing what waits for me in the final level :P

Progress

ABC Challenge - 11th update

🎉It’s done 🎉

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXY7 (26/26)

Abyss Odyssey 🎁 - beaten
Finally I got back to it and beat it. It’s a 2D Platformer with proceduraly generated levels. IMHO what this game lacks the most is a proper guide/tutorial on the game mechanics, which seem weird and hard to understand on first try. The controls are not easy to master either. All those things makes it hard to enjoy the game, but once you get used to the controls and understand the mechanics (especially capturing enemies) it becomes a really fun and pretty easy game to play. So fun for me that I beat it several times with different characters. Wanted to also try online but couldn’t connect to anyone. And final boss on Nightmare difficulty is painfully hard, didn’t manage to beat him on solo run. It got me annoyed once with a bug when the game crashed on the level just before the final boss (Nightmare) and I lost my very good sword and other equipment, arghhh..

Other games

Rock of Ages - beaten
One of the first games I bought on Steam (~seven years ago), quickly abandoned back then. Great humor with really funny cut-scenes. It feels like Super Monkey Ball mixed with Tower Defense game. But you can just focus on riding your ball fast and safe when attacking, and when you are putting obstacles in TD mode you can just spam explosives near the end of level - just make sure you are faster than your opponent. This strategy worked well in story mode (not sure about online against humans - could not connect to anyone)..

Vanguard Princess - beaten
2D anime fighting game. I just completed story mode for one of the characters, and that was enough for me. Very low resolution and no graphics settings at all. Japanese voice audio and pervy-anime style with barely covered females - some people will like that :P.

Heli Heroes - completed
Easy but not a great game with lots of annoyances: background in main menu scrolling extremely fast, controls getting remapped for some unknown reason, voice commenting your actions with same quotes over and over, screen feels cropped in full HD resolution making it impossible to see the boss in most of the levels. But the worst thing was that I was getting stuck on the start of almost every level on the only thing to make your heli move was to spam pressing F8 key to change graphics settings from high to low and back.

Progress

ABC Challenge - 10th update

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXY7 (25/26)

Abyss Odyssey 🎁 - in progress
Not touched since last update…

Dishonored 🎁 - completed (base game only)
Wow, this one is amazing. Set in steampunk plagued world, you become an assassin and are given a lot of freedom on how you want to go through your missions - you can just try to kill everything around you or pass through the game stealthy without killing anyone. How you’ll do it will then take some effect on the world and environment. Same goes with side missions. Great level designs, nice story, cool skills. Recommended for multiple playthroughs. Wanted it to be my last ABC Challenge game - cherry on the top 😋- but I still couldn’t get back to AO and wait longer…

Next ABC Challenge update should be my last - crossing my fingers :P

Other games

Ticket to Ride - beaten
It’s an implementation of a popular board game that many of you already know. Without DLCs I’d access to just one map variant (USA).
I’ve spent one nice evening with it playing against the bots and trying to get non-grinding achievements, which was fun.

The Whispered World - completed
I’ve chosen it as I intend to play Silence (it’s sequel) soon. Fun point-and-click adventure from Daedelic. Great dialogues, lovely protagonist (other characters were fun too). The hand-drawn graphics was really cute, but it resulted in not-so-cute low framerate animation. The ending twist was a bit surprising, in a weird way, felt unnecessary, but overall I enjoyed the game :).

Crazy Machines 🎁 - beaten
Puzzle game, The Incredible Machine clone. Fun thing - I’ve installed it with an attitude that I probably won’t like it, quickly resign, throw it to “Won’t Play” and move on. But I did like it - most of the time at least. Many of the puzzles had good difficulty - not too easy, but solvable after some thinking - Unfortunately one of the last levels got me pretty frustrated when I had to be pixel precise with one of the items to pass the level. That’s where I decided I’ll just finish main campaign and leave other additional levels.

Samorost 3 - completed
Point-and-Click adventure. More like exploration than puzzle game, stunning visuals and beautiful music - another original experience from Amanita Design. Maybe not as charming as in Machinarium but it’s still a very enjoyable game.

OLDTV - beaten
Cool Free-to-Play game. The rules are simple, there are a lot of similar games on mobile devices: you see a colored text - Left-click if the color fits the name, Right-click otherwise. And be fast. Every chapter in the main game mode brings new traps. Later on you can unlock some skills and endless mode. Game has a nice stlye and is pretty immersive.

Ironclad Tactics🎁 - unfinished
Card Strategy game from Zachtronics, much diffrent than other games from this studio - didn’t absorb me like Spacechem. Art style and sound was ok but there is no much tactics in there. Also I’m not a big fan of card games and I’m far from finishing it. Maybe I’ll come back to it later.

Some stats

Few months ago I started gathering some stats of my progress, here’s a chart of how my backlog was changing during last months: Red bar means my backlog got bigger comparing to previous month, Green means my backlog got smaller (more games beaten/completed/definitely abandoned than newly added to account).
My plan for upcoming months is to constantly lower my backlog and have only green bars :)

ABC Challenge - 9th update

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXY7 (24/26)

Undertale 🎁 - beaten
The story and characters are pretty cool. The game surprised me positively many times with its plot twists. The music was great too :) Wanted to finish the game without killing anyone but I could not get past one of the fights. There are other endings that can be achieved if some conditions are met, but I am not going to try get them, at least not now. From the drawbacks: controls haven’t felt smooth, steam screenshots doesn’t work, UI/UX could be better (like if I want to drop multiple items or compare stats of weapons in inventory).

Abyss Odyssey 🎁 - in progress
Not touched since last update…

Other games

Test Drive Unlimited 2 🎁 - beaten
Wow, this game gave me mixed feelings. It’s an Open World MMO (was) Racing game. I really enjoyed driving around the Islands, especially cruising along the coast in Maui. Unfortunately I’ve missed much of the content as the servers are down most of the time. Some online features are back and working (but not all), after two weeks of being down. If you have it in your backlog and wanted to play it online, I’d suggest to try now as no one knows how long Atari will keep maintaining servers.

Jurassic Park: The Game 🎁 - completed
It’s different than other Telltale Games I’ve played. This is basically a Quick Time Event hell with breaks for conversations and few easy puzzles. Also there is only one choice for user to make that has any impact on the story (very close to the ending). The story was bearable but nothing special, I could smell those plot twists from a mile :P. Some of the QTE sequences were pretty demanding if you were going for Gold (flawless run). Tip: If you want go for Gold in each sequence, it’s much easier to do it when playing whole episode, as there are checkpoints you can fall back to in case of any miss.

Mark of the Ninja - completed
Really great ninja 2D platformer, where you want to stay in shadows to survive. Nice graphics, good audio, awesome mechanics. Lots of techniques and skills gives you multiple ways you can take to beat each level. Protagonist feels much more like ninja than in any other game. New Game Plus mode also was a lot of fun, especially final levels. One thing game lacks: there is a choice you can make in the end of the game, but there are no consequences of that choice shown.

ABC Challenge - 8th update

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXY7 (23/26)

STRIDER™ / ストライダー飛竜®🎁 - completed
Finally beaten. Story is a 80’s-like ninja sci-fi nonsense but the gameplay is quite fun. Smooth controls, nice graphics and lot’s of collectibles. It becomes much easier after you learn to use “Option C” special move on bosses :). Enjoyed it enough to give it another run for missing achievements.

Abyss Odyssey 🎁 - in progress
Not touched since last update…

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes 🎁 - beaten
Beaten it on my third approach for this game. I really like stealth games, and expected to enjoy this one greatly, but I did not (at least not ‘greatly’). It wasn’t a bad game, but something felt not right, don’t know what exactly :(. Even tough this is only a prelude (demo) to MGS V: Phantom Pain, there are many side missions to attempt and some collectibles to find. But I’m not gonna give them a try now, maybe later…

Other games

Microsoft Flight Simulator X: Steam Edition 🎁 - unfinished
I had fun with it most of the time, but there were cases of glitches and weird bugs or badly adjusted controls for some of the machines (especially helicopters) that ruined it (a bit).
The main mode for this game is free flight simulation which bored me quickly. There is also a large set of missions, varying in difficulty,and you might need to spend ~100h to complete them all. I’ve spent ~35h in game and beat about half of them. Probably not gonna to try the rest.
Now I’m not sure how to qualify this game, I’ve beaten just half of the missions but the main mode of this game is free flight simulator which you just can’t beat or finish.
P.S. You can install Terra Emergence Project v.1.3 to get a bit better textures.

SpaceChem: 63 Corvi (DLC) - completed
I’ve bought and completed missing DLC. It turned out to be much easier than late missions of the base game.
Finishing each level was still very satisfying :)

HITMAN
This game was already completed, but I came back to it as the devs have reactivated Elusive Target challenges. I’m gonna to try those I’ve missed.

Downwell 🎅 - completed
Unexpected Christmas gift form Akantha (thanks again:). Simple in design, hard to beat. Quite fun rogue-lite, where you kill enemies with your gun-boots, and the only way to reload’em is to land or stomp on enemy. There are just four areas, each is split into 3 levels and has different theme and enemies. After each level you can choose one of randomly selected upgrades. Getting to final boss takes lots of tries, and beating him unlocks Hard Mode - more enemies and higher prices in shop.

ABC Challenge - 7th update

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXY7 (21/26)

Looks like I’m back on tack…

Strider 🎁 - in progress
Got some progress, beat one boss, but I am still far from finishing it.

Abyss Odyssey 🎁 - in progress
Not touched since last update…

Gods vs Humans 🎁 - completed
Finally I did finish it. Turns out there is < 80 levels in main campaign, you can see my impressions in previous post, the game did not get better since then

NEON STRUCT: Die Augen der Welt 🎁 - beaten
Stealth game set in cyberpunk future. The story is fine, the graphics could be better, more detailed and more diverse (even for an indie game). The stealth system is simple but fun. After missing few ‘collectibles’ (Geocaches and Strangers) I decided to go for 100%. Found everything in remaining levels, then retook first levels, just to learn that you have to find all Strangers in one playthrough for achievement (same with geocache and S Ranks achievement) All that work for nothing :/. Still, I enjoyed the game, so I might try again later. Undeniably the best part is the music which was just amazing and fits perfectly.

Eldtritch 🎁 - beaten
Rogulike in lovecraftian world. It’s a rather simple rougelike with short list of weapons and items but a fun one. Got the good ending on my 9th playthrough. Weird thing that second world was much much harder than the third world.

The 7th Guest 🎁 - completed
90s Horror-themed FMV puzzle adventure (Fun fact: One of the first games released on CD). The story was hard to follow for me, because of sound quality and no subtitles, so I focused on puzzles. Most of them were fun: some were easy, some were pretty hard. One required a great language knowledge and is really hard for non-native speakers. Another one was a very irritating board game against CPU. I read somewhere (not sure if it’s true) that AI level for that puzzle game depends on your PC clock speed and it was pretty simple to beat it in 1993, but now it’s just extremely hard… Thankfully you can skip almost every puzzle by using in-game hint book if stuck. Summarizing, had some fun and some irritation, nothing special.

Other games

Blacklight: Tango Down 🎁 - beaten
It’s hard to call it beaten as it’s mostly Multiplayer game, but since MP is dead I just finished solo missions and there is nothing else I can do there. Solo missions were not much fun, levels where very linear and the AI of the enemies was pretty lame but I liked some of the ideas e.g. bluescreen-like vew when stunned.

Microsoft Flight Simulator X: Steam Edition 🎁 - in progress
Started it very recently, will write more about in the next post

NOT A HERO - ME, MYSELF & BUNNYLORD CAMPAIGN (DLC) - completed
~2.5h of fun for less than a dollar. The story and humor is as fun as in base game. The additional levels are bit larger and different than original, and you can play as Bunny Lord ;)

ABC Challenge - 6th update

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXY7 (17/26)

Not much progress this time…

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 🎁 - beaten
Gears of War in Warhammer 40k world experience. The Campaign is solid, linear but easy to just go through. The story is fine, the most fun is in cutting through hordes of orks, it was really enjoyable :) MP is dead, couldn’t connect to any other player (not sure if there were any :D) You could still try to grind MP achievements in private sessions but it would take ages…

Strider 🎁 - in progress
This might get abandoned, but I am still hoping I’ll get back to it…

Abyss Odyssey 🎁 - in progress
Another candidate to abandon. First impression was like: Nope, not fun, not gonna waste time.. But it was only 15 minutes so far. Will give it another chance later

Gods vs Humans 🎁 - in progress
Another one I wanted to abandon, it’s not a great game for sure. And as there is no ITH entry I had no idea how long it can take to finish. Each level is almost the same, except of slightly harder difficult initial state (which, in fact, is random and if you restart the level, you can get easier or harder tower levels setup), it’s just boring. Sure there are multiple mythologies you can unlock, but those differ only in tower/humans look. Gods in each mythology have very similar powers.
As I am now near the end of fourth mythology (apparently out of 5) I think I will somehow struggle through it to the end

Other games

Virginia - completed
Just bought and finished it yesterday, fits Nonverbal November theme. I really liked it (most of the time :) ). It’s more like interactive movie than a game, but thanks to linear mechanics the storytelling is pretty solid, and it’s easy to finish in one sitting. Music builds suspense really well, and the graphics feels nice, if you like the style (except of protagonist face which stands out does not fit the rest). Unfortunately the story gets really weird and confusing at the end… Bummer :/

Watch Dogs - beaten (UPlay)
I usually don’t write about non-steam games, this is an exception.
It feels kinda like GTA & Assassins Creed mix Chicago City itself is great: people talk, jog, hug on a bench, have fun in a park, stop to tie up their shoe etc. It feels really live. And most of the missions are nice, you can try to finish’em stealthy or force your way put by ‘exploding’ the guards :D But the story does not stand out, nothing special with dumb plot twist near the end. Also driving physics is worse than in Sleeping Dogs, didn’t liked it.
There are some MP modes, and one (Online Hacking) was sometimes really irritating when someone invades your single-player session to hack you and you need to find him before he succeeds. It was annoying when you just solved the puzzle to find the collectible (e.g. hacking ctOS tower) and you can’t complete it because someone is hacking you… But on the other hand it was really fun to hack other players and see how they run around hoping to find you :D The rest of MP modes were moderately fun
Missed one achievement, which requires you to find 23 songs with “SongSneak” app, spent an hour trying to find one last song, but gave up. It’s totally random whether you find it, you can spent hours and not get it. Not gonna waste more time for a silly designed achievement :P
Reassuming, not great for AAA game, but nice for a free AAA game :)

ABC Challenge - 5th update

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXY7 (16/26)

Bionic Commando 🎁 - beaten
My first impression was bad. Although arm-swinging brought some joy, the story was dull and combat mechanics sucked. First part was set in boring dark rainy city. Levels were pretty small, surrounded by lethal radiation areas which greatly limited possibilities. Thankfully the situation gets better in second part when we unlock all skills which make combat fun. Also the setting changes to nicer green sunny jungle. But still, it was at most mediocre game.

Quest for Infamy 🎁 - completed
Retro-styled point-and-click RPG mash-up. I liked most of the characters in game, their dialogues, voices and humor. Another good thing was that you had to choose 1 of 3 classes (Brigand, Sorcerer or Rogue), each class having different quests to do and giving different means to solve them. From the drawbacks: grinding required to get some of the achievements, and some achievements didn’t pop up on steam on first (or second or third) tries and I had to retry - it was annoying.

Jack Orlando Director’s Cut 🎁 - completed
This fits both ABC Challenge and Rewind Monthly Theme. Finished it after ~2 year break. I liked the setting (30s) and the story. But the best thing were the dialogues, these were real fun and made me laugh many times. Graphics was good for game from 1998, but animations could be better.The game itself is not the easiest point-and-click game as you can die here and there is a lot of useless junk you can pick and then wonder if there is any use for them.

Strider 🎁 - in progress
Haven’t touched it for days. Hopefully I’ll get back to it soon. One drawback I noticed so far is that game is not saved on all checkpoints. What I mean is that if you die and continue, you continue from the latest checkpoint, but when you exit and run game again you continue from the beginning of the map. There was no info about it so I learned it the hard way and had to replay a lot.

Other games

SpaceChem - beaten
This is for Rewind Monthly Theme. I don’t remembered why I abandoned it 5 years ago (probably the level of difficulty) but I’m really happy I did beat it at last. And it took time (>50h). There is some story in this game but I have no idea whether it’s good cause I just totally ignored it, the only thing that matted was beating next level :P. I think I will try to beat the rest of challenges and buy DLC when it’s on sale.

ABC Challenge - 4th update

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXY7 (13/26)

Tembo The Badass Elephant 🎁 - beaten
Fun platformer, it took me a while to beat the final boss. Too much grinding needed to complete it.

Xpand Rally Xtreme 🎁 - completed
The rallying is fun but not easy, lose focus for one second and you land on a tree…
This one took me much more than I expected. HLTB has one entry for Completionist: 4h. But this has to been some kind of speed run with every race/rally perfect. It took me 13h to win every race. The game does not allow to set widescreen resolutions by default, but thankfully it’s easy to manually modify config files.

Strider 🎁 - in progress
Started on hard difficulty. I am not sure if it was good idea right now :)

Other games

Sleeping Dogs™ - beaten (or completed?)
GTA-like game set in Hong-Kong. I really liked fighting mechanics, police cases, hacking mini-games and ‘random events’. On the other end - the driving physics could be better… Completed main game, missing only DLC achievements

Half-Life: C.A.G.E.D. - completed
Pretty nice mod for Half-Life 1. Great music, nice level designs and weird but cool bonus level. There are also achievements but integrated with Steam (Got them all).

SpaceChem - in progress
This is for Rewind Monthly Theme. I like the game but levels are getting pretty difficult and taking more and more time…

Also I just got final missing achievement for Dead Island which I’ve beaten 2 months ago. It wasn’t easy to find other players willing to play coop…