So I am trying out the BLAEO Generators and it looks pretty neat. :D

Since last post, here’s what I have been up to:

Anyway, I am always working on several games at once, and almost always, I keep adding more to my active list…

I restarted playing Strider because it’s a SG win that I didn’t finish when I played it a few months ago, restarted last night initially where I left off, and couldn’t remember a thing. So started a new game and will hopefully at a green bar to show next time I update.

I restarted playing The Void Rains Upon Her Heart because I played and reviewed it about a year ago, but something brought my attention back to it. It’s basically a side-scrolling bullethell game with only one enemy per stage–the boss. It’s effectively a roguelite boss-rush game with really neat mechanics and boss enemies. It has a decent amount of progression and quite a bit of updated information since I played a year ago. I have already made it through 2/4 difficulty level story modes since restarting it earlier this week, so I guess I can put a green bar around it already. But I will go a bit farther and put it into my next update.

A friend gifted me Highrise Heroes: Word Challenge and what a blast it is. For people who enjoy games like Boggle (or any other word-search games that is of a non-board game nature) this game is great. It keeps leaderboards for every single level, both global and from your Steam friend list. But really, the game is fun and the challenges are interesting. I am about 1/5 of the way through so far, it’s taken about 2 hours to make that much progress. I see from Astats that people quote more than 30 hours to 100%. I have a friend who has 80+ hours and still has not yet gotten there. I will definitely try my best to run through the story/main game and decide from there.

I think I am finally done grinding Swords & Souls: Neverseen as I have done everything I wanted with the game. There are a few achievements that I just perceive to be completely outside of my ability level. I have done everything else. It was really addictive and amusing to grind an extra 40 hours past the main game, but I think my keyboard would thank me a little to take a break, perhaps permanently, from the game.

On the other hand I have gone back to grinding DemonCrawl because it’s the best iteration of a Minesweeper clone I have run across. It’s a roguelite RPG with a very minimal story but really tough levels. I never beat the game on Normal mode yet, but I restarted the game on Casual mode (where there’s guaranteed no-guesses needed) and after I run through that, I will try my best to make my way through the Normal levels, and who knows, maybe go beyond and try the more difficult settings there are. Tracking my progress is my YouTube let’s play playlist that I will try to keep updated as far as I can go.

Speaking of Rogutelite games, there are two modified deck-building roguelites that I have started almost simultaneously, Chrono Ark and Iris and the Giant. Both are excellent game. Of course Chrono Ark needs a lot of work still, it’s in Early Access and needs a lot of rebalancing. I had a lot of trouble with it so far, but it’s a good game design and is quite fun. It’ll be a long grind if someone wants to unlock everything that it has to offer. I hope they do enough rebalancing and rewrite a better tutorial so people didn’t have to suffer through it initially as I have done. My first 1/2 hour to an hour was really frustrating and I almost put it down. But I ultimately decided to give it a bit extra and now my opinion is much more positive. I may wait for a few more updates before picking it back up though.

On the other hand, Iris and the Giant is a fantastic game designed by someone who has done a fair share of work in creating children’s books. And it shows. The game follows the protagonist through her inner mental struggles as she literally fights her own demons. The deck building mechanic is very open and your cards essentially can be used only once, so the flow of each run is dependent on how you approach it. The art is like construction paper cut-outs, and very neat. I am having a great time with it, and I hope I can spend some more time with it soon.

Finally a game I want to bring to your attention is Puddle Knights as it’s coming out in 2 days, on March 3, 2020. It’s a heck of a cool puzzle game for puzzle lovers. It’s difficult too, no doubt about it. The game mechanics are really neat and despite me seemingly likely to pull out my hair on multiple occasions in my first-look video for the game I am having a really good time. What gets me worried is that the Puzzle Lovers Steam group owner has already put in 20+ hours and hasn’t seen the light at the end of tunnel yet. And I know for a fact I spend way longer on puzzle games than he does. Hopefully I have enough gaming time to devote to the rest of this game. (First world problems, right?)

Thanks for reading my mumbo jumbo, once again. I will play around with the BLAEO Generators some more in the future! Until then, I hope everyone a wonderful day and keep having fun!

I put in a request to join the Steam group, I don’t know if I have been around long enough and would qualify. If someone reading this can let me know more, especially if I don’t qualify, that would be great. Thanks!

I know I am still a slouch compared to a lot of you folks here, but I have been around for about a month and I have definitely been more diligent about playing and trying my best to finish some games recently. My problem is buying games, I can’t seem to stop buying more games, even though my library is already more than I can hope to finish in 10 lifetimes.

Recently I joined the last Challenge Me that concluded a couple of days ago and spent a decent amount of time on two of the five games suggested to me: Space Run and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. I only beat the former, as I don’t like to replay games too much, unless it’s a game that has captivated me a lot and I want to relive the experience. Space Run was fun though I am not huge in Tower Defense games and this was a bit outside of my comfort zone. I just barely beat the campaign by grinding through all of the bits and getting all of the upgrades, and finally getting lucky on completing all of the quests. I saw some comments about people saying that they blew through the campaign in about 5 hours, it took me more than 17… 🤐 Though I did have fun, so no regrets. As for Hellblade, that was quite an experience, it was powerful and moving, creeping me out in several places. I took my time to walk through the environment mostly instead of running. The story was excellent. It was suggested to me in an aside by a friend a couple of years ago, and I just never got around to it. I am really glad that it was brought to my attention again. I have since purchased the soundtrack and encouraged a few other people to play it. For people who had issues with psychosis and mental health difficulties, it may not be a great title to play through, especially anyone with active struggles, but it’s certainly a very worth title.

On my own, I went back in and completed the Yakuza 0 story and could at least say that I beat the game. I may go back and do some side quests and such, but knowing that it takes more than 200 hours to complete to 100%, I am just not sure if I have the patience to do that. This is an amazing game though, and I certainly may well do this in the future. I think for me, the best part of the game is the story, so I might as well move on to the next part of the story in Yakuza Kiwami since 0 was the first game I played in the series. Now I want all of the rest to be moved to PC so I can experience them all… LOL!

Then after that, I quickly ran through Snakeybus, it only took about 1.5 hours to get to 100% completion. It’s a 3D snake with a bus segment for each segment. The snake gets longer when you pick up passengers by running into them and then delivering them to a specified spot. It was very amusing to play because of the way it is constructed. The snake can jump (got a jetpack or something) and so you make 3D pathways to keep growing without crashing. I got this on sale, so for 75% off, it wasn’t a big deal. I probably would have not wanted to spend the full price on it though.

Escape Lala 2 was on sale at around the same time. I ran through the first game in about 1/2 hour and then bought the second game. There was an issue with too many frames being processed and so I emailed the developers while putting the game on hold. They have since fixed the frames and now my GPU won’t be going crazy, it’s on my list to play very soon. The first game was a very fun pixel P&C puzzle game, and so I am hoping just a bigger and better version in the second game. The first game is free by the way, check it out if you might be interested.

I went through all that there is available in Hollow Island, a new sandbox game that just allows you to do whatever. I am hoping to see more story and quest content in the future with updates. It’s pretty fun but for people who rely on story-driven content in-game, it’s non-existent here. I started by doing some beta-testing and followed through the available content post-launch, mostly to help the developer. Since I mostly rely on story-driven materials in-game to keep engaged.

Amid all of this, a 50% sale for Swords & Souls: Neverseen came to Steam and I couldn’t resist. This game I had kept my eyes on it for quite some time and wanted to play it for myself. I find mindless grinders sometimes get really boring, and this one seem to rely on a few mini-games for grinding that still required a lot of attention. I am more a reflex-driven kind of player instead of deep strategy, so I sunk somewhere north of 17 hours to complete the story and a couple of hours since just to keep grinding away, because there’s an endless mode for the game. I think I will be revisiting this for quite some time on and off. (No Cloud saves either, so going to keep it installed until I know I don’t want anything to do with it any more. XD)

Path of Giants is a brand new puzzler that came out that mesmerized me for a couple of days. It’s a set of well-designed short but elegant logic puzzles in a really cute game design. It doesn’t really bother me that I only got 16/17 achievements, since the last one is for not using Undo function for 12 levels (the whole main-story). I may go back and replay the game another time, but for now, it will just have to sit there while my attention is elsewhere.

Anyway, I am working on a couple of other games at the moment, maybe my next update won’t be so long. But it’s a first for me, and I don’t know how you people make your updates look so fancy, so I am just sticking to plain text here with some links.

The biggest problem for my ever-growing backlog is that I do a lot of game curating and beta testing, to the point that I start a lot of games, give some pointers to developers and then put it down before moving on to the next project. It gets mess at times, so I am constantly trying out new games and trying to break games at the same time, pushing them as far as I can and trying to create bugs to report back. I may also have a job that occupies about 60 hours of my time per week, so I am constantly trying my best to find proper balance to work, play, spend time with family, go the gym, etc. So pardon me if I am not too active and don’t post too many updates.

Thanks for having me as a part of this community!