Month's End Update: March!

Just a really short update (only one game) as I haven’t had a ton of free time lately and the time I have had I’ve been using to play Magic: The Gathering. xD

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• The Way
  

  11 hours playtime

  22 of 29 achievements

The Way

The Way is a sidescrolling puzzle platformer as well as occasionally a shooter and briefly a bullet … heck (it’s too easy to be deserving of hell). It has a pixel art style that I found to be very pleasing to the eye, though it does interfere with one or two of the puzzles in that you can’t quite tell what you’re supposed to be looking at. Most of the puzzles are well designed, excluding the one or two I just mentioned as well as another one in which it’s necessary to be able to see the entire puzzle, but you can’t and you have to basically keep trying and adding on commands until it works and is more time consuming than anything else. The controls feel a bit off for a platformer and I never quite got used to the jumping, though no section is so difficult that I couldn’t get through it (though usually with some deaths). The end level (and especially the final boss) really disappointed me, up to that point most of the game was trying to puzzle out a solution to advance, but the last level essentially throws that away and makes it into a shooter with the final boss being the bulletheck part. The story basically amounts to your wife dying for some reason and you searching an alien planet that you believe holds the secret to immortality. Both endings you’re given are about the tone that you would expect given the setup and I felt satisfied with how they played out. There’s also an end of credits scene that hints at something far larger going on and seems to be hinting at a sequal that I would love to play. So I recommend picking this one up if you can.

Mid-Month Update: March!

Been quite busy with work and trying to manage my spending since it turns out I may be a bit impulsive when it comes to buying certain things, who would’ve guessed. Also trying to not let my recent anxiety and depression issues impact my work though it’s not always possible. Anyway, seems I was on a bit of a platformer binge these past couple weeks and please ask me any questions you have!

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• Ori and the Blind Forest
  

  14 hours playtime

  35 of 50 achievements

• VVVVVV
  

  2 hours playtime

  1 of 19 achievements

• Oscura: Lost Light
  

  4 hours playtime

  5 of 7 achievements

• iZBOT
  

  4 hours playtime

  5 of 9 achievements

Ori and the Blind Forest

Please note that this is the Standard Edition, not the Definitive Edition which has some extra content and probably fixes some of my complaints. Anyway, this is a beautiful looking game, the artwork is simply fantastic and is a really good example of what the Unity engine can do with 2D graphics. The gameplay seems to flow very well, though I found some of the abilities to be a bit redundant (such as climb and wall jump, they serve the same functionality, just that climb is less annoying to use). Overall I really liked the level design, especially with how some areas were able to be completed before gaining certain skills but it would just be harder or more time consuming to do so. Exploration is often rewarded as there are tons of secrets and stat boosts to find. The only part that really got to me was a puzzle near the beginning that I felt was a bit too difficult for how early in the game it is and for how little practice you have at that point with the ability needed to complete it. I did feel that the end level of the game, Mount Haru, was amazing. It tested my skill with pretty much every ability that I had acquired throughout the game and was actually challenging enough to feel like it was an end level. As for the story, it was just kind of there and really would have benefitted from some more attention. All in all, I really enjoyed Ori and the Blind Forest and I mostly just had a lot of small complaints about it. I also don’t think it was as great as people told me it was, though I still think I will try to pick up the Definitive Edition in the future and play through that.

VVVVVV

A cute little puzzle platformer that I’m sure almost everyone here has played by now. First time through this I remember giving up on Victoria’s (the dark blue one’s) intermission level as she kept wanting to move forward just a little bit too far or not quite far enough and I just got frustrated and quit. There are plenty of little collectibles to find, though I didn’t get them all (though I felt like I explored just about everything) and wasn’t very interested in finding them all anyway. Also, crying cow? I’m assuming it’s a reference to something? Anyway, worth a play as it’s fairly short and has some replay value if only for the achievements.

Oscura: Lost Light

Another little puzzle platformer albeit a bit buggy and annoying at times due to poor level design. Oscura definitely does a few interesting things with its mechanics though I found these to be few and no section of this game really made me have to think about what I needed to do to continue on with the level. The graphical style is a bit odd, yet appealing, and makes it hard to determine what can and can’t be stood upon at times. The store is minimal, but makes sense enough, though the payoff at the end is pretty much nonexistant. I’d say pick it up on sale or in a bundle if you really want to give it a go.

iZBOT

I really liked iZBOT. It’s a platformer reminiscent of Super Meat Boy, though not as difficult. I found it to be challenging enough to keep me engaged while not so challenging as to begin to frustrate me. The controls are very smooth and responsive and made (most) mistakes feel like my fault. The graphics are simple, yet appealing and the sound design is minimal (though I do like how the pitch of your jump sound changes when you do the double jump). The story is unimportant and is pretty much just a short slide show at the beginning with another slide at the end. The only issues I had was that some of the hitboxes felt a bit off and wallsliding is supposed to reset both of your jumps except when it doesn’t for some reason, though neither of these really affected my overall enjoyment of the game.

Month's End Update: February!

Not a lot to update on this time around, just finished a couple games and working on a couple more for the next update!

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• Swordbreaker The Game
  

  5 hours playtime

  36 of 67 achievements

• Quantum Conundrum
  

  8 hours playtime

  8 of 25 achievements

Swordbreaker

This is basically just a choose-your-own-adventure book with some nice looking art and lots of weird scenarios and references. The English isn’t always spot on and the writing in general is fairly mediocre, but it’s entertaining for a time. Really just don’t have much to say about this one!

Quantum Conundrum

I really really wanted to like this game and I did for about the first half of it. It has character and pretty good puzzle design and does things with its mechanics outside of my expectations. However, the environments get repetitive pretty quickly and the humor just becomes grating. The story is just sort of there and has a very unsatisfying ending that leaves the game open to a sequel (that may or may not be coming???) and overall was pretty pointless. As for the DLC, they’re basically level packs with very frustrating, confusing, and time-consuming puzzles that I didn’t feel like trying to finish, but maybe I’ll return to them at a later date if I really feel like it. Either way, I’d probably only pick this one up if you are looking for more games to help your puzzle-platformer fix.

Mid-Month Update: February!

Just started working again so I may not have as much to say in my future updates, but I still have some time to game and should be able to at least update you guys on a game or two every two weeks! Anyway, just have few this time around and I’m going to also talk about an unbeatable game that I’ve been playing a lot and has become one of my favorite games on Steam! Also, as always, if you have an questions, feel free to add me on Steam or leave a comment!

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• The Fidelio Incident
  

  6 hours playtime

  13 of 14 achievements

• Celestian Tales: Old North
  

  23 hours playtime

  4 of 18 achievements

• Black The Fall
  

  2 hours playtime

  6 of 14 achievements

• Day of the Tentacle Remastered
  

  7 hours playtime

  41 of 58 achievements

• Slay the Spire
  

  26 hours playtime

  15 of 26 achievements

The Fidelio Incident

A very enjoyable walking simulator with some neat puzzles and a fairly compelling story. The premise of the game makes everything feel somewhat surreal while still making sense if you pay enough attention to realize what is actually going on. There are basically two different stories going on here, what is currently happening to the husband while he’s trying to save his wife and what essentially led them to being in this situation through collectible journal entries written from the wife’s perspective. The graphics and settings are very appealing and really help to emphasize what is happening in the game. And the voice actors feel convincing (and have Irish accents which I love)!

Celestian Tales: Old North

Celestian Tales is an RPG that tries to have a story that is playable through various different perspectives, but rather than showing each one in a single playthrough you have to play it six times (one for each different character) in order to see the entire thing. While this may sound like it works, the amount of content that changes with each character and clear one-dimensional nature of each character just makes one playthrough barely bearable (though there were a few twists in the story that I wasn’t expecting, though nothing to do with the playable characters). I did like the art style (it looks like oil paint), though there were a few errors/glitches here and there. The battle system also wasn’t too bad, but ends up being far too easy on Normal or Hard difficulty and nearly impossible at points on Nightmare difficulty. I also played through the Howl of the Ravager DLC, which might as well be it’s own game given its length. It really helped add some context to parts of the story, but some of the impact of it is lost depending on which stories you played through in the base game (such as the outcome of a “will they, won’t they” relationship). Anyway, it was a decent enough effort, but I feel like it needed some more planning and tweaking especially since this was the first game in a planned trilogy. The second game is coming out relatively soon, so hopefully the developers can fix some issues.

Black The Fall

This game reminded me a lot of INSIDE. Though I think I found this one to be a lot better than INSIDE. The graphical style, setting, and premise are all very similar though the story is more coherent and easier to understand. It also felt like there was more gameplay and puzzle solving to this game than there was with INSIDE.

Day of the Tentacle Remastered

Really don’t have much to say about this one. It’s a classic point and click adventure game. Though not near the top of the best ones I’ve ever played. The humor is there and some of it was a bit outdated for someone my age, but I still found it entertaining. A lot of the puzzles felt more like time syncs to try to pad the game length out and I honestly quickly got bored (and started to use a guide). I also really liked how smoothly the transition between the old and new graphics was whenever you hit the shortcut key for it.

Slay the Spire

I absolutely love this game! It’s on my list of best games I’ve ever played despite it still being in development. The blending of deck builder and rogue-lite works perfectly and there are a ton of new deck archetypes to discover and try out. The graphics are amazing to look at. The developers update fairly frequently and really try to listen to the feedback that they’re getting. I’ll probably talk about it some more when it comes out of Early Access, but I just wanted to mention it here because of how much I’ve been playing it recently!

Starting a new job today (just cashiering so nothing major). So I probably won’t have as much time on my hands to handle my backlog. I’ll try to keep up my bi-monthly updates, but if I haven’t gotten through any games I might just skip one (though I do have a couple games in reserve to talk about, mainly ones that just can’t be beaten)!

Month's End Update: January!

Haven’t made as much progress as I did at the start of the month, but I still made some! Haven’t been busier, just didn’t really feel like playing as many games this time around. I’ve beaten 4 games in the past couple weeks (all walking sims it seems) and am almost done with another ABC Challenge game, but I’m having a bit of trouble finishing it (in that it really bores me but I’m almost done with it and I’ve already used all of my swaps). Anyway, if you have any questions, please leave a comment or even shoot me a friend request (as I always have time to talk about video games)!

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• What Remains of Edith Finch
  

  10 hours playtime

  5 of 9 achievements

• Caligo
  

  6 hours playtime

  2 of 3 achievements

• Thing-in-Itself
  

  45 minutes playtime

  10 of 10 achievements

• Virginia
  

  15 hours playtime

  8 of 17 achievements

What Remains of Edith Finch

This game was phenomenal and probably one of my favorite games ever! The graphics are bright and beautiful and the game runs fairly well. The world feels real enough but still has that air of impossibility and mystery that makes a game like this work. It just makes looking at the environment entertaining and makes you want to explore each new area thoroughly, not necessarily because there are collectibles to find, but because of how the environments improve the story and build upon the characters. The story is another thing that just makes you want to continue on, each new part usually brings some sort of different type of gameplay with it and is very emotional and weird and fun all when it needs to be. Now not everything in the story makes perfect sense, but rather than feeling poorly written or lazy, it feels like it’s not supposed to because of who the characters are and what is implied to be going on. Everything in this game just fits together perfectly to make a very compelling game that I personally think everyone should play.

Caligo

I find it very hard to talk about Caligo without spoiling anything. It’s a pure walking simulator with collectibles that give some context as to what is going on in each area. The graphics look nice enough, but the game runs very choppily even on the lower settings. The story is mostly comprised of thinly veiled allegories about what the world is and what it’s like to live on it, mostly told by the visuals with some explaining by the characters (though I can’t quite remember just how much they explain). I’d say check it out if you like walking sims, otherwise maybe get it during a sale if it sounds interesting to you.

Thing-in-Itself

Another walking sim, but as with any short story-based game there just isn’t much to say. The game describes itself as an interactive short story, which it most definitely is, though the choices it gives you aren’t really choices and don’t change anything. Really the only reason to replay the game is to get all of the achievements. The art style is definitely different from most games, most of the assets are flat images rather than 3D models. It’s oddly appealing, but I haven’t been able to decide if they’re like that because of artistic reasons or because it was easier to do it that way (maybe both). The story didn’t quite feel like it got the point it was trying to make across (though you can get a sense of what they were trying to do), I feel like if the game were longer or made it so you could see what was going on from the other side of things then it would have been a lot better (at least story-wise). But the game really isn’t expensive and has been bundled a few times, at the very least it was an interesting experiment.

Virginia

Virginia is an experimental, cinematic walking sim that I really didn’t like at first, but when I thought more about the story and what was going on (and got used to the jarring jump cuts) I began to enjoy it a lot more. I feel like most of the negativity it’s gotten is fair in that the game is fairly confusing and the lack of voice acting to help explain what is going on or give context to some of the scenes contributes to that. Though I also think that most of the negativity comes from people that wanted a clear-cut story-driven game that they didn’t have to think too much about (or were expecting a completely different game, which is fair as I feel the store page misrepresented the game to some extent). Really the best way to explain this game is that it’s a game that tries to play out like a movie (from a first person perspective) that kind of does and doesn’t work, but the “doesn’t work” part is mostly due to the creative and story decisions that they made rather than the way the game was visually presented.

Mid-Month Update: January!

It’s been a very productive first two weeks of the year … in terms of beating games at least. Already done with 3 games from my ABC Challenge as well as 5 others! If you have any questions about any of the below games, please just ask in the comments! (UPDATE: Also I’ll be trying to do one of these updates about every 2 weeks!)

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ABC Challenge

• 1953 - KGB Unleashed
  

  2 hours playtime

  no achievements

• Amnesia: The Dark Descent
  

  13 hours playtime

  11 of 17 achievements

• Bulletstorm
  

  6 hours playtime

  no achievements

1953 - KGB Unleashed

An okay point-and-click adventure that takes place in an abandoned Cold War Russian bunker where some shady experiments were taking place (because of course they were). You are there for some reason and some sort of story goes on around you, I didn’t find the story all that interesting and at a few major points it made no sense whatsoever to me. A redeeming part of the storytelling is that there is plenty of collectible documents to read with varying degrees of interesting content, though I personally got bored with a lot of them just due to how technically they were written (in that some felt like actual boring military documents). As for the gameplay, I thought some of the puzzles were very clever if a bit vague as to what you were actually supposed to be doing. My biggest gripe about the gameplay is that some of the necessary items feel a little too hard to spot/find.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent

A really atmospheric horror game set in the good olde days! You are Daniel, you have amnesia (big surprise there), and you have an evil spooky thing chasing after you. I really liked this game and the story that you slowly uncover throughout, the character of Daniel feels decently realistic with his reactions to the events that are going on around him and his prior actions that you uncover through diary entries given the situation he was in. The atmosphere in the game is very well done and the creators seemed to have a knack to make safe places feel unsafe. Despite this, the game wasn’t all that scary for me. The AI was very easy to figure out and the scripted events eventually became predictable which quickly turned the horror into more of an inconvenience than anything else. As for the extra content, the short stories in Remember were interesting and helped add to the story and Justine was scarier for me than the base game and had a lot of good ideas, it’s just a shame that it was so short.

Bulletstorm

I’m not a huge shooter fan, generally takes a very specific mood for me to feel like playing one (or a fun multiplayer component), so my opinion of Bulletstorm may be a bit biased. The game definitely has some very creative ideas for a shooter with it’s skill kill system. The time between each new gun feels near perfect in that you seem to get one as soon as you start to get tired of the ones you already have, it’s just unfortunate that the guns that should be the most fun to play with are so useless whether because of very limited ammo or too little damage. The story is passable, predictable, and about what you would expect once it starts to get going. The characters are witty and sometimes funny but can be grating at times and are generally one-dimensional.

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Other Games

• Candle
  

  10 hours playtime

  16 of 23 achievements

• Leaving Lyndow
  

  3 hours playtime

  7 of 7 achievements

• Hexcells Plus
  

  14 hours playtime

  6 of 6 achievements

• Hexcells Infinite
  

  12 hours playtime

  6 of 7 achievements

• Clustertruck
  

  3 hours playtime

  14 of 19 achievements

Candle

A beautiful looking adventure game that definitely deserves the awards it got for its visuals. The gameplay is mostly similar to point-and-click games with slight platforming elements. What you need to do to progress is usually straightforward but quickly becomes aggravating when it isn’t. But the story is still cute and the world is full of character and appealing artwork and was just an overall enjoyable experience.

Leaving Lyndow

A very short walking simulator with nice visuals about a girl who has to say goodbye as she leaves her home to explore the world. The main focus is on the leaving part as is in the title, but due to its short length there really isn’t much to talk about without spoiling most of the game.

Hexcells Plus and Hexcells Infinite

I honestly loved the trilogy of Hexcells games. To me they were just very engrossing and gave my brain quite the exercise as I tried to logic through the puzzles without having to resort to guessing. For me it was possible with the majority of the puzzles, but there were a few here and there that felt impossible to do without taking some guesses.

Clustertruck

A quirky little speed platformer RNG simulator! Incredibly fun and incredibly frustrating at times due to the semi-random nature of the trucks that you have to jump upon. The levels and worlds are different enough that you don’t feel like you’re doing the same thing each time and most of the abilities are fun to use. My only issues with the game is that most of the more expensive abilities feel useless when compared to some of the cheaper ones and that sometimes a level can be impossible just because of the RNG in the driving and physics of the trucks.

I’m Back!

Hello all! I’ve decided to try to get back into BLAEO and actually beat my mountain of games at some point (probably will still be playing as a ghost). I’ll try to be a little more active than when I was here the last time. In fact I started an ABC Challenge (here’s the list) and already have the first one done!

• 1953 - KGB Unleashed
  

  2 hours playtime

  no achievements

Finished NORTH

I’m not entirely sure what to say about this game. It has a very surrealistic feel and the atmosphere is nice. I did get lost as one of the doors seemed to be in a rather odd location that wasn’t easily noticed. The graphics are what you get from the usual lower budget Unity title, but the story is somewhat interesting and the way the letters are used to convey what you need to do next (despite the order you do things in) is well implemented. The game’s store description is stretching the truth at least a little, except for the length which is accurate. My verdict is: give it a go, can’t hurt and won’t take too much time out of your day.

Finished 1979 Revolution: Black Friday

I’m very torn with this game. On the one hand it is reasonably well told and has a unique setting that makes the game appealing. On the other it left me disappointed due to it’s fairly short length. When I reached the end I was just thinking, “That can’t be it, is this just Episode 1 or something and it does credits at the end of each like Telltale games???” But … no … that was it, it just ends very abruptly. The length clearly affected other things as well. None of the characters (except the main character) get much screen time so there isn’t much character development. Also there just isn’t time for your choices to feel like they had any far-reaching affects. The visuals are nice to look at, though there are some mistakes (such as when I saw a man walk through a newspaper machine). As for gameplay, don’t expect anything more than what you normally get in games like these (think the amount of gameplay in a Telltale game i.e. minimal). So I guess my recommendation is a very shaky yes, but only if the devs plan on continuing the story.