UPDATE NUMBER UNKNOWN +24 AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Just like the last year, I once again couldn’t bring myself to write updates these past months. I just feel like I have nothing to say. Y’all are writing insightful descriptions and reviews and I’m sitting here with my bullet points of liked/disliked saved in a .txt document, waiting to be posted… It’s quite depressing.
But hey, I actually played some games in the meantime, so there’s that?

The (NOV) label indicates games played for the November monthly theme. No games played for December theme.

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten

✔️ LIKED: This game is much better than I expected! Visually pleasing with fluid gameplay, responsive controls and fairly easy levels with a bit of platforming.
❌ DISLIKED: Can’t rebind controls. The Vandheer Lorde (one of playable characters) seems oddly slow, as if there was always a slight delay to his movement (might be just me?)

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten

✔️ LIKED: Cats! Enough said ❤️
❌ DISLIKED: Can get repetitive after a while, also there’s quite a lot of running back and forth (luckily, the map isn’t that big).

⁉️ STATUS: Almost Beaten (2 out of 3 chapters) (NOV)

✔️ LIKED: A good mix of VN and point&click adventure with a noir touch to it. Interesting story with dialogue choices that affect the output.
❌ DISLIKED: Frequent switching between 3 or 4 different characters without a good reason. Not a fan of that.

⁉️ STATUS: Endless

✔️ LIKE: A unique idle/clicker game with slight ARPG elements. Developers are active on Discord and doing an OK job of listening to feedback. The microtransactions so far are tolerable for a F2P game.
❌ DISLIKE: Looks like a mobile port (even though it’s not), that might turn some people away.

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten (NOV)

✔️ LIKED: Solid point&click gameplay all in all. I liked the “deduction” scenes where you have to match 2 relevant pieces of information to progress.
❌ DISLIKED: For a P.I., the protagonist has a radical anti-guns stance. Now I’m not some trigger-happy gun enthusiast either, but it just doesn’t match the tone of the game when the stereotypical gruffy deadbeat detective “forgot the code to his gun cache because he didn’t touch the thing since he bought it”.

⁉️ STATUS: Completed (NOV)

✔️ LIKED: A great point&click adventure set in a bleak future. Good story. Decent voice acting.
❌ DISLIKED: The “action” parts are mildly annoying, especially when going for the “no damage” achievement.

⁉️ STATUS: In Progress

✔️ LIKED: A very solid RPG with slight choices & consequences elements. Lets you chose your playstyle thanks to classless talents. The stealth is not only workable, but quite enjoyable. Aged really well, people aren’t lying when they say this game is a bit of a hidden gem.
❌ DISLIKED: Could use more dialogue options in conversations and vanity armor slots.

⁉️ STATUS: Completed (NOV)

✔️ LIKED: A very good detective adventure. The graphic, the story, the deduction puzzles, the voice acting… I have nothing to complain about here.
❌ DISLIKED: Alright, I do have something to complain about. The demons that you have to either kill via a QTE or sneak past, they serve no real purpose other than to annoy the player. There’s no good narrative reason for them to be there and they only break the otherwise excellent experience.


🗒️ NOTE: Luckily, you can easily edit a config file to make the demons less aware to your presence or have them ignore you altogether.

⁉️ STATUS: In Progress

✔️ LIKED: No durability system! Thank God, one game that doesn’t insist on your stuff breaking after you use it for 5 bloody minutes.
❌ DISLIKED: Very limited inventory space. Small and inconsistent stack sizes (for example, dirt blocks stack to 400, whereas stones only stack to 200 and most materials only stack to 50). Makes no sense imho.

⁉️ STATUS: Completed

✔️ LIKED: Simple yet oddly addicting gameplay. Lots of costumes to choose from. Tons of amusing references.
❌ DISLIKED: The last level requires quite a lot of grinding to pass. Some people may dislike the mobile-like gameplay.

UPDATE NUMBER UNKNOWN +23, ABOUT THE GLORIOUS RED.

Much like the last month, I managed to beat some games for the Ruby theme. That just feels so good!

The (JUL) label indicates games played for the July monthly theme.

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten (still playing though)

✔️ LIKED: A great rogue-like with a bit of perma progression. Worth noting is the randomized skill tree which I quite like even though it ads another layer of RNG. The game greets you with a “best played with a controller” message which is usually a bad omen, but luckily KB+M works perfectly fine.
❌ DISLIKED: Every time you want to scrap a dropped piece of equipment, you have to equip it, open your inventory, scrap it and then re-equip the item you were using. That’s quite inconvenient. The map sometimes rotates on its own (usually after fights with bosses and champions) even with the Dynamic Camera option disabled. That’s obviously not a major issue, but it bugs me just a little bit :D

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten (JUL)

✔️ LIKED: A masterfully handled mobile port where your goal is to destroy humanity by unleashing a variety of deadly diseases. Offers a lot of symptoms to choose from to build your own plague. Comes with a pretty complex level editor.
❌ DISLIKED: Greenland is ridiculously hard to infect and in most cases, there isn’t much you can do about it. Some achievs rely heavily on RNG, to the point where you have to sit there for an hour and a half, reloading the same bit of a mission in hopes that the one random occurence finally happens. I’m not kidding, that’s how long it took me to get one of those random bastards - 90 minutes worth of reloading!

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten (JUL)

✔️ LIKED: I like the idea, the game goes kind of deep with its “Oldagers vs Newagers” philosophy and you can express your opinion on the matter and even slightly influence the outcome (depending on whom you choose to kill - you play as Death).
❌ DISLIKED: Unfortunatelly, it’s a bit of a wasted potential. This was meant to be just a small experiment, but if they made it bigger, longer and more complex, it could have been much more, because the foundation is there.

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten (JUL)

✔️ LIKED: Surprisingly well-made “story driven” top-down shooter with stylized graphic and decently voiced cutscenes. Seriously, don’t let the graphic deceive you, this game is legit! It’s also free to play.
❌ DISLIKED: The last level of NG+ is perhaps a bit too hard because of all those enemies who come at you all at once. I would prefer if the drawings in cutscenes were also done in the stickman fasion, but that’s just a personal preference of mine.

⁉️ STATUS: Completed (JUL)

✔️ LIKED: An alright point & click adventure depicting the 10 plagues of Egypt. Chapters are short and you can replay them separately, making it easy to obtain missed achievs. I think I’ll be buying the other “Rusty Lake” games.
❌ DISLIKED: An obvious mobile port. The Steam overlay only works half the time and the game doesn’t offer much in terms of graphic and volume settings. There’s not even a “quit” button for fuck’s sake - you have to switch to windowed mode and close the window.

⁉️ STATUS: Completed (JUL)

✔️ LIKED: Nicely drawn gore scenes.
❌ DISLIKED: It’s a laughable mixture of shallow story, idiotic characters and hilariously bad dialogues. Very clearly someone’s first attempt at writing, an attempt that failed spectacularly.

⁉️ STATUS: Completed (JUL)

✔️ LIKED: A well written gamebook - genuinelly amusing without making you feel upset about turning such a classic piece of literature into a comedy game. The humor is spot-on most of the time and the author seems to have a fair understanding of Hamlet (the book this is based on), resulting in even the most silly scenes not feeling completely out of touch. The narrator did a pretty good job with his voice acting.
❌ DISLIKED: The text auto-advances a bit too fast, some kind of option to adjust speed would have been useful. The game does have checkpoints, but you can’t place your own “bookmarks” which is a bit inconvenient when you just want to mess around.

🗒️ NOTE: Being at least vaguely aware of Hamlet’s plot probably helps a lot. For example, I imagine the “stabbing Polonius through a curtain” joke is about 100% less funny if you don’t know what the deal is.

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.

⁉️ 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.

⁉️ 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).

⁉️ STATUS: Completed (JUN)

⁉️ STATUS: Completed

⁉️ STATUS: Completed

⁉️ STATUS: Completed

⁉️ 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)

⁉️ 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!)

⁉️ 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).

⁉️ 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 :/

⁉️ 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 ;)

UPDATE NUMBER UNKNOWN +21, ABOUT TRYING AND FAILING.

So, may monthly theme didn’t go too well - I managed to beat just one game. One ended on my “won’t play” list and another one sits on the “unfinished” pile. Sigh.

⁉️ STATUS: Won’t play

✔️ LIKED: It’s a nicely drawn game.
❌ DISLIKED: Unfortunatelly, the gameplay is centered around playing hide and seek with a monster. That’s something I’m just not fond of. The game does give you a warning when the monster appears, but you often don’t have enough time to react (either because you just so happened to go through the “wrong” door or because there is no hiding place) so the monster kills you instantly. From my experience, there is about 50% chance that you’ll die everytime you change rooms. I have no patience for that.

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten

✔️ LIKED: Interesting visual stylization, cool swordplay. Generous time limits in some story- and side-missions. I hate time limits of any sort, but here I never felt stressed out by them because the game provides enough time to pass the level and even pick up some collectibles along the way. I also really liked the “Ulti-Mondo” skin that you unlock by beating the game for the first time.
❌ DISLIKED: The utterly, ridiculously terrible button-mashing during boss fights with the Big Bad. It’s nearly impossible to pass, at least with KB+M (though from what I read, people with controllers had troubles with it as well). If you can’t smash the button fast enough, it’s game over for you, beceause there is no other way to get past those fights. That’s just plain bad design, pointless and unfair. Also, the optional challenges were frustrating as hell (but yes, they’re optional).

⁉️ STATUS: Completed

✔️ LIKED: A good mix of adventure, walking sim and platforming. The core idea appealed to me (humans can’t adapt, so they destroy). The game communicates with the player quite well without relying on tutorials (that’s something games often get wrong and are either needlessly detailed or way too obtuse). Also, it’s easy to get the “speedrun” achiev! O.o
❌ DISLIKED: Lack of proper in-game settings. The transitions between areas are not exactly seemless. At one point, the game gives you instructions that are pretty much an opposite of what you actually need to do (when you get the jetpack boost for the first time). The “interview” part of the story felt pointless and out of place.

⁉️ STATUS: Completed

✔️ LIKED: Nice art, decent audio. The writing is ok, the story clearly has some sort of a vision as to where it wants to go.
❌ DISLIKED: No real menu to speak of and when you beat the game, it just quits to desktop. The combat system (while interesting) wasn’t implemented very well. The riddles were completely out of place and had nothing to do with what’s going on in the game.

⁉️ STATUS: Completed

✔️ LIKED: Mildly amusing strategy game in which you have to assemble a group of adventurers based on their preferences and then succesfully complete said adventure. Easy to 100%, which is a plus if you care about achievs.
❌ DISLIKED: There’s quite a lot of typos. The game’s somewhat reliant on RNG and the interface can be confusing at first.

⁉️ STATUS: Completed

✔️ LIKED: A turn based strategy where you are the “villain”, going against the “heroes” (though they did conquer your kingdom, so you’re just taking back what was yours). Quite short, quite easy.
❌ DISLIKED: Treasure chests seem to exist to be picked up by enemies, that’s a bit annoying. Overall, I would prefer if the gamplay was a bit slower and more “balanced”.

⁉️ STATUS: Unfinished

✔️ LIKED: A stealth game set in old-time Japan, in which you control a party of heroes. I like how each of them has different abilities and you have to make them work together to achieve their goal, all for the glory of the Shogun.
❌ DISLIKED: The gameplay is a bit too challenging for me. In every mission, there’s one part where I get stuck for a long while and that annoys me, that’s why I lost interest in the game for now. I do intend to finish it because I enjoy stealth games, but you know how that goes… Soon(tm).

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten

✔️ LIKED: A mildly amusing, relaxing (if grindy) word game. I like that, it helps me improve my english. Though I wish there were some good word games available in my language (we mostly only have the lame ones).
❌ DISLIKED: It requires quite a lot of grinding, especially towards the end before you are strong enough to tackle the dragon. I found it a bit difficult to remember which words I already used in longer games.

UPDATE NUMBER UNKNOWN +20, ABOUT HAVING FUN WITH APRIL’S MONTHLY THEME (AND MORE).

Feels good to be participating in those monthly themes again :)

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten

✔️ LIKED: Amusing writing, great in-game songs. The narrator did a really good job.
❌ DISLIKED: The game always waits for your summoned helpers to get into some sort of a position before starting a cutscene, causing unnecessary delays. The boss’s tower has annoying, needlessly slow elevators.

⁉️ STATUS: Completed

✔️ LIKED: Nice pixel graphic, fairly short levels (each level being a separate case that the titular detective worked on) with some neat references here and there. Mildly amusing. One case featured the ghosts of H. P. Lovecraft and E. A. Poe <3
❌ DISLIKED: The Mall bonus level. That one involved a lot of backtracking and the story wasn’t as appealing to me as the other cases.

⁉️ STATUS: Completed
(I played this after finishing the first part of Deponia: The Complete Journey, so I knew exactly what to do. That’s why the playtime is so low.)

✔️ LIKED: Rufus, obviously! ;D On a more serious note, it’s an alright point&click adventure.
❌ DISLIKED: Sometimes, the minigames won’t tell you what you’re supposed to achieve. Especially the one with pigeons and magnetic fields, that was purely trial and error. Not fond of that, myself. The “Droggeljug” achievement was incredibly annoying (you have to play through the game again, with every single word replaced by the word “droggeljug”).

⁉️ STATYS: Beaten

✔️ LIKED: Great visuals, great gameplay, simple and responsive controls. A lot of perks to customize your playstyle, even some stealthy ones. Thumbs up for everything being kind of themed after judges, from the JYDGE’s design through the weapon to the word “Mistrial” when you fail a mission. I think that’s clever.
❌ DISLIKED: In the game, the word JYDGE is pronounced as a regular “judge”. They should have put emphasis on the “Y” and really pronounce it as “jydge”. New story missions are unlocked by completing challenges from previous missions, so some amount of grinding is required (this can apparently be adjusted in the settings, though).

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten

✔️ LIKED: A game by the same developers who made JYDGE. The visuals, gameplay and controls are just as satisfying. I also liked the voice acting for the antagonist, there’s just something about the way he speaks his lines.
❌ DISLIKED: All in all, I liked JYDGE a bit better than Neon Chrome.

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten

✔️ LIKED: It’s an alright action RPG. Lovely graphic, with several tombs and cemeteries, which I’m personally very fond of (as some of you might know). Decent voice acting; I especially liked the “Voice” that talks to Victor throrough his adventure. If you are looking for some undead- and vampire-slaying action, you might find this game enjoyable.
❌ DISLIKED: I disliked the odd emphasis on co-op. I mean, the game is perfectly playable solo, but… it’s just plain weird. Stuff like emotes are dropping in singleplayer mode, making it more difficult to obtain useful items. Bounties and treasure hunts are handled by redeeming codes shared by other players - what? Why? It’s like the devs couldn’t decide between singleplayer and shared world, so they attempted to do a bit of both.
Oh, and also: many achievements are unobtainable without the DLCs, which bothers me maybe more than it should. Look at that completion score, though: 40 out of 90 achievs, when it’s in fact closer to 40 out of 50 for the base game. Why can’t the DLC-related achievs come with the actual DLCs instead of showing as if they were a part of the base game? Grr! ☠️

⁉️ STATUS: Completed

✔️ LIKED: Gorgeous graphic, genuinely amusing writing and truly epic final boss fight.
❌ DISLIKED: The complete lack of any sort of in-game settings. The music was on a short loop and it got annoying rather fast, made worse by the fact that you can’t adjust the volume (other than turning off your speakers, in which case you’re obviously not going to hear the sound effects either). Extremely annoying world map that served no other purpose than to artifically extend the play time. Frequent loading screens (they are short, but there’s A LOT of them). Last but not least, the combat. Bloody hell, how I hated the combat!

UPDATE NUMBER UNKNOWN +19, ABOUT WAR AND DEATH.

Today, I want to tell y’all a story:
A long, long time ago one of my Steam friends gave me a copy of Darksiders. Back then, I played it for about an hour, then lost interest and never touched the game again. As an owner of the original game, I got the Warmastered edition for free at some point and remembering that I have that in my library, I recently entered a SG giveaway for the Deathfinitive Edition of Darksiders 2. Lo and behold, I actually won! “Right,” I said to myself, “time to give old Darksiders a(nother) go.”
And so I ended up playing the Warmastered edition and it turned out to be one of my most favourite games. The point is, I want to thank the person who gave me the original Darksiders all those years ago. Whoever you were (because I forgot :/ ), you’re awesome.
Thank you!

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten

✔️ LIKED: Overall, this is a very good game and I enjoyed it way more than I thought I would. The visuals are quite pleasant. The gameplay is an interesting mix of hack-and-slash action, 3D adventure and puzzle solving. It tells a decent story too, which is always nice. I also really like what they did with the title. Warmastered. Heh-heh. Oh, and Mark Hamill is there, voice acting the Watcher! <3
❌ DISLIKED: The control scheme isn’t the most comfortable one, especially when it comes to throwing or using your “gadgets”. On a few ocasions when you need to jump or climb somewhere, the camera fixes itself at a rather awkward angle.

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten

✔️ LIKED: First and foremost, you play as Death! The gameplay is about 50% combat and 50% puzzle solving, which I personally enjoyed. I also enjoyed the climbing and wallrunning in this game - some people seem to dislike this element, but I found it really quite satisfying. And again, thumbs up for the creative wordplay. Deathinitive :)
❌ DISLIKED: It’s one of the most broken games I’ve ever played. Seriously, on the technical level, this shit feels like it’s in early acess! You will randomly be unable to move after you close any in-game menu. It offers very few graphic options. Trying to rebind the controls is a huge pain in the back and some keys (like the arrow keys) aren’t recognized at all. Many players reported crashes after certain bosses. The game was abandoned by the devs all the way back in 2015 (2016?) and the much needed patches never came out. It’s all the more baffling because this is supposed to be the “improved” version of the game. If this is an improvement, then the original must have been an utter disaster.

Also, HOGs! Honestly, I don’t know what to write about these anymore. They’re HOGs, they come with the usual set of ups and downs.

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten

⁉️ STATUS: Completed

⁉️ STATUS: Completed

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten

UPDATE NUMBER UNKNOWN +18, ABOUT THE STEAM & BLAEO PROBLEM.

So Steam really fucked things up again with its genius “learning about this game” feature. An utterly useless thing that no one asked for, that does absolutely no good and doesn’t help anybody in any way. It hurts legit less-known developers by burying their game under the heaps of garbage that still fill the store, it denies players legitimately earned achievements by not counting towards their profile stats and it messes up with sites that track your library, like BLAEO. It’s pissing me off. For the record, 3 of these 8 games aren’t tracked on this site:

⁉️ STATUS: Completed

✔️ LIKED: Well, it’s a HOG. I like those, so I enojyed the gameplay.
❌ DISLIKED: The story was lame even by HOG standards and some of the in-game notes were really badly written.

⁉️ STATUS: In progress/Endless

✔️ LIKED: I found myself a new clicker. Yay! I like the change of pace that this clicker offers. Rather than buying new units, you play as a single character and upgrade him/her. You start as an apprentice, then you kind of specialize by choosing a magic school to focus on… it’s really quite unique :)
❌ DISLIKED: I found myself a new clicker… oh no! The first run is honestly quite dull and boring.

⁉️ STATUS: Completed

✔️ LIKED: Again, I liked the game overall because I enjoy playing HOGs. They also had a couple of really interesting hidden object puzzles where instead of a list of objects, you had a list of emotions and traits (like “deception”, “greed”, “bravery”…) and needed to find the objects that represent those emotions/traits.
❌ DISLIKED: No bonus chapter to follow up the ending that was very clearly designed with a bonus chapter in mind.

⁉️ STATUS: Completed

✔️ LIKED: A light-hearted, mildly amusing adventure with beautiful visuals.
❌ DISLIKED: Nothing. Honestly, I see nothing to complain about. The game is qiute short, but that’s not really a bad thing in my opinion.

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten, but new content added

✔️ LIKED: This game’s a pleasant surprise. A very enjoyable bullet hell rogue-lite featuring mildly silly mechs and alien technology. Developers are actively working on updates and bug fixes.
❌ DISLIKED: It’s a bit on the difficult side of things. By no means a hardcore game and by no means an unfair one, but I’m not sure I can experience the new levels, let alone the new boss, having beaten the preivous “final” boss just twice out of the many attempts.

⁉️ STATUS: Completed

✔️ LIKED: You know Sokoban, right? A nice, relaxing puzzle game where you push boxes out of your way to reach the end of a level? Well, that’s Mushroom Quest.
❌ DISLIKED: The game could really use an “undo” button for when you accidentally push a box in the wrong direction while walking around it. It features “only” 60 levels, so it might seem too short to some, but personally I prefer shorter games so I don’t consider that a downside.

⁉️ STATUS: Completed

✔️ LIKED: And once again, I enjoyed playing Noir Chronicles because it’s a HOG and I like HOGs.
❌ DISLIKED: The faces! The awful, horrible faces in this game. Seriously, don’t attempt to put real-life faces on your character models, it’s not necessary and more often than not, it looks bloody hideous.

⁉️ STATUS: “Beaten” (kinda-sorta endless)

✔️ LIKED: The core game is a competently made shared-world rogue-like.
❌ DISLIKED: Everything that isn’t the “core game” is a blatant, shameless cash grab. Seriously, the monetization in this bloody thing stops just short of reaching EA levels of bullshit. I personally also very much dislike the way they handle events. New players or people without super-strong gear can rarely participate in anything, that’s simply disappointing.

UPDATE NUMBER UNKNOWN +17, ABOUT LONG TIME NO SEE O.o

So I’ve been away for more than 6 months. At first, I was too busy playing Warframe to do anything else. Then there was a long, annoying event in one of the clickers I play, so that ate a lot of my time. And then, I was just plain lazy. I’ve been meaning to start posting here again for a long while now, but subconsciously I was kinda waiting for a “good opportunity” to do so. The start of a new year is a pretty damn good opportunity, so I have no further excuses :D

Here are some of the games I played in the past three months or so:

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten

✔️ LIKED: The graphic style and the gore. Many people found it cringy, but I liked the game’s (and the protagonist’s) attitude. Violence is golden!
❌ DISLIKED: The black and white graphic along with the isometric view sometimes made it a little difficult to see who’s shooting at you and from where. Speaking of which, some enemies would often shoot from off-screen. Bloody annoying!

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten

✔️ LIKED: Very pretty sceneries. Blasting enemies with powerful magic felt very satisfying, even with all its flaws. There’s necromancy, too!
❌ DISLIKED: The crafting system was an overwhleming mess. They tried too hard to make it feel complex, but they only made it needlessly complicated and confusing. The constant need to stop to manage your inventory and spells felt out of place in such a fast paced game. Sometimes, I found it hard to “keep up” with the enemies due to the player character’s fairly slow speed.

⁉️ STATUS: Completed

✔️ LIKED: Everything. Great relaxing story-driven game with an interesting plot twist. Great graphic style, too. Nice and easy, just how I like it.
❌ DISLIKED: Some achivements don’t unlock properly - I got one achiev that I shouldn’t have gotten, and had to do three playthroughs for some achievs to finally register. Plain weird.

⁉️ STATUS: Completed

✔️ LIKED: Pretty much everything. A very enjoyable puzzle game with some light platforming. Nice and fairly easy, though a couple of rooms took me a long while to figure out (which isn’t a complaint, mind you).
❌ DISLIKED: A lot of backtracking, but you unlock the fast travel feature quite early in the game.

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten

✔️ LIKED: Charming visuals. Gameplay was engaging right from the start, with fairly enjoyable combat and some light puzzle solving. You play as the villain.
❌ DISLIKED: One dungeon was horribly glitched - had to restart that level like 4 times because either my character or the object needed to solve a puzzle got stuck somewhere. The descriptions of items weren’t exactly informative.

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten

✔️ LIKED: Satisfying melee combat. Surprisingly well-written and meaningful story, good pacing as well. Geniunelly funny remarks from the protagonist. And our demonic companion Hoji <3
❌ DISLIKED: Bullet sponge enemies - there were plenty, often two or even three at once!

⁉️ STATUS: Beaten on GOG

✔️ LIKED: Pretty sceneries. The ability to customize your playstyle thanks to the upgrades (see the dislikes about that, though). Enjoyable if you are just looking for some demon-slaying action.
❌ DISLIKED: Much less interesting story than in the previous game. Much less satisfying gameplay. Pseudo-open world level design that didn’t really suit the game, coupled with less-than-ideally handled checkpoints. No manual saves. The upgrades (in the form of figurines found in containers or dropped by enemies) kind of felt like they existed just to justify the open world; should have been handled like in the previous game, only more “in-depth”. Disappointing if you loved the previous Shadow Warrior and wanted more of that.

⁉️ STATUS: Completed

✔️ LIKED: One of the good visual novels out there. The art is not too anime-like. Coherent writing, aimed at a mature audience. Interesting idea.
❌ DISLIKED: Very slow pacing during the first half(?) of the game. Takes quite a while to get to know the characters so we have little reason to care until much later. The game sometimes focuses too much on the “novel” part and too little on the “visual” part, so we often stare at pictures of empty rooms or streets. I feel that they could have done more with the idea of the protagonist’s “sickness”.

Update number unknown + 16, or scrambling to keep up with my schedule.

---

Pillars of Eternity ⌛ ~110 hour | ✪ 12/48 | ☑ In Progress

	Deus Ex: Mankind Divided ⌛ N/A | ✪ 0/81 | ☑ N/A	? ? ?
	Life is Strange: Before the Storm ⌛ N/A | ✪ 0/34 | ☑ N/A	? ? ?
	The Shrouded Isle ⌛ N/A | ✪ 0/16 | ☑ N/A	? ? ?

The Secret Order 6: Bloodline ⌛ ~3 hours | ✪ 28/28 | ☑ Completed

---

---

Update number unknown + 15, about the bad and the ugly.

---

Renoir ⌛ ~1 hour | ✪ 0/9 | ☑ In Progress

Catacombs of the Undercity ⌛ ~4 hours | ✪ 4/19 | ☑ In Progress

Close Your Eyes ⌛ ~4 hours | ✪ 8/8 | ☑ Completed

Story Of the Survivor: The Escape DLC ⌛ ~1 hour | ✪ N/A | ☑ N/A

Labyronia RPG ⌛ ~14 hours | ✪ 6/6 | ☑ Completed

---

And a little bit of good, played for theme:

	Please Close the Doors ⌛ ~3 hours | ✪ N/A | ☑ Beaten
	Mini Ninjas ⌛ ~19 hours | ✪ N/A | ☑ Beaten
	Cook, Serve, Delicious! ⌛ ~32 hours | ✪ 43/52 | ☑ Beaten
	Mystic Saga ⌛ ~25 hours | ✪ 40/53 | ☑ In Progress

---

---