Assassinated by the Backlog xurc’s profile
Initializing…
Methodology
My mental model for keeping track of my backlog is to handle SG wins and the rest of the library separately, so I divided my profile into two pipelines:
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This default list helps me stay on top of SG group requirements and events involving the members’ wins.
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Never played, up next ➔ Unfinished, currently beating ➔ Beaten, to be completed
These three lists help me shape my personal (i.e., unrelated to SG) gaming plans.
Evergreen
- Stay above 80% achievement completion rate
- Stay below 20% unplayed on BLAEO
- Stay below 20% unplayed for SG wins
Yearly
| Goals | July (beginning to use BLAEO) | End of year |
|---|---|---|
| Reach 50% average achievement completion rate | 44% | 50% |
| Reach 18% beaten + completed on BLAEO | 14% | 18% |
Monthly Report, December 2023
Completed
The humor is kinda hit-or-miss for me, but devouring random garbage with a bottomless hole is incredibly fun lol.
Also, I stopped reading the Trashpedia entries very early on and it turned out later there are s few achievements involved. Pay attention to the entries if you intend to get the most out of Donut County.
Beaten
My only complaint is the map isn't very useful: no text labels for building names, no markers for quests, etc. Other than that, the stealth aspect is solid and the RPG system is surprisingly robust, and I'm most impressed that this game was largely a one-person effort.
I've reached the HLTB average time, so I guess I'll consider this one Beaten…? Anyway, I guess I found out I don't really enjoy micromanaging so many subsystems in 4X games.
Completed
I had pretty high expectations going in and it didn't let me down at all. I love collecting stuff in games, and the riddles in it are often fun as well. The core concept of photography is pretty unique and carried out very well. (Thank you for the recommendation, Zelrune!)
I didn't read the game descriptions and based my expectation on the high rating, so it's totally on me that I felt disappointed. I kinda expected Tangle Tower overloaded with bad animal puns, but it turned out more similar to Pineapple on Pizza. Good thing it didn't take itself seriously and overstay its welcome.
I have to say this series really works the best for me on a touch device (it's the joy of manipulating a geometrically impossible object with your fingers), but I appreciate the effort of making a landscape PC port.
Beaten
The story is very simple and basic as expected but I love that it's explicitly a transgender story. I'll get the remaining 6 endings and also pick up the full paid version, A Year of Springs.
I loved the pure chaotic energy, but I'm less enthusiastic about grinding through the sluggish combat for collectibles. Overall still great though, played it in one sitting.
Monthly Report, November 2023
Welp, November’s over before I knew it and I barely played anything this month (again). I need to find some laid-back games to help me relax a bit in December.
Beaten (SG win)
I imagine this game would be much more fun to play with some friends. Playing solo was kinda boring since the slapstick humor didn't really do anything for me.
Regarding the game itself, my primary complaint is that it's a tad too buggy. It's a physics-based comedy, I get it, but it's not fun when delivery jobs are rendered impossible to carry out because the player character got stuck in the vehicle and couldn't get out.
Monthly Report, October 2023
Completed
None! :( I had an unpleasantly busy October. Here's to a better November, hopefully.
Beaten
I received this gift from the SGM group, and have submitted my review to be released in an upcoming issue. The achievements stopped unlocking midway through the game, so I ended up having only 9 of them. I enjoyed it more than the previous title, Bendy and the Ink Machine, but overall still can't say I love it.
This sequel made substantial improvements over Ink Machine. I loved how it introduced upgrade systems for combat and powers, albeit very simple ones. Certain other additions are not very useful, such as the mechanism where you can craft a card to unlock a safe containing various resources. I didn't bother using those much and got by just fine.
The stylized art style with very muted color palette can make it difficult to distinguish objects I need to interact with. I wish it were colorful like Cuphead.
A short exploratory game with a surprisingly good story. It reminds me a lot of Eternal Threads, another SG win of mine, because both tell stories by letting the player replay previous events on the timeline in an AR-like fashion. I enjoyed Tacoma more because of the story and its short length.
I crammed this one into the end of my schedule of a stressful month for the PAGYWOSG group's October event, and I'll replay it for more achievements soon.
Completed
Received this game in a TalePlay giveaway and enjoyed it immensely. Reviewed on Steam.
Beaten
Played this via Family Sharing in preparation for reviewing the sequel, Bendy and the Dark Revival, for the SGM group. Both Bendy games seem to have some issues with how they implemented achievements, and in this case, I didn't get any achievements at all despite finishing the campaign.
I enjoyed seeing all the Bioshock influences in level & enemy designs, weapons & combat, and certain themes. The game by itself was okay, but I found the gameplay kinda tedious at times.
Monthly Report, September 2023
August Report
Completed
The Witch's House MV 
5.0 hours, no achievements
Review article submitted to the lovely SteamGifts Magazine group and will appear in the October issue <3 I'll make another BLAEO post when the issue goes live.
I loved the unsettling atmosphere and, while I found some of the puzzles underwhelming, the Extra mode added in this remake revamped all the puzzles and addressed all my disappointments.
Beaten
A gamebook-style choose-your-own-adventure interactive fiction. I loved the Lovecraftian theme and the way skill tree can often make as much, if not more, impact on the plot as the player's choices. Playing it brings back fond memories of reading horror-themed physical gamebooks as a kid.
A charming and funny point & click wacky adventure. Looking forward to replaying this after a few months to get all the missable achievements (I love these in point & click games!), as well as playing other titles from the Homestuck franchise.
The game doesn't stand out in any way to me, but it's enjoyable enough to keep me interested. There is, however, one very memorable moment. After I wiped out the entire population of an enemy AI planet using interplantery nuclear weaponry, it naturally dropped out of the current match. Several turns later, I received an in-game notification that some infrastructures on that planet were damaged by nuclear waste. It took me several seconds to realize that, yes, while that planet is a lifeless nuclear wasteland, the residual nuclear waste is indeed still damaging the remains of what used to be a highly developed civilization. That was quite a horrible realization.
A short cozy story with an endearing art style from a Taiwanese studio, loved every minute of playing it. I'll replay it some time in the near future to 100% the achievements.
Completed
A short, delightful, surreal joke that didn't overstay its welcome when setting up for the punchline. And it's free!
Beaten
Behold, a whopping…*drum roll*…zero! I was aware I spent the vast majority of August playing SG wins, but only now do I realize just how little attention did I pay to my personal backlog. That's part of the fun of writing monthly BLAEO reports for me. :)July Report
Bought the game chiefly because it helps charities rescue stray cats. Aside from the cute visual style and informational tips on taking care of cats, the Sudoku part is good enough but not outstanding, lacking QoL UI conveniences such as highlighting all the instances already filled in the grids when the mouse is hovering over one of the number on the numpad (or cat on the catpad, to be precise). Though I do acknowledge I've been spoiled by Sudoku games designed for more hardcore players and am thus harder to please.
All in all, it was a great purchase and I definitely will purchase other games from this studio.
Game design
I'm not a huge fan of the design decision where there are 4 different endings you can get, especially because
- the section you must go through to achieve all endings have the clues scattered across multiple rooms
- I can't identify much logical reasoning behind the locations of these clues
- said sections no longer include in-game hints
so in the end I had to resort to online walkthroughs to get all endings.
Performance
I personally also encountered more bugs in this one out of all 4 The Room games, most notably: mouse jittering when rotating wheels, making it extremely difficult to turn it to the desired position; some textures are not rendered correctly on the Steam Deck despite rated as Playable.
All that said, this is another solid installment in the series and I enjoyed it a lot.
This is my favorite The Room installment by a decent margin, because of the way this one is structured. It no longer has multiple endings the way the previous title, The Room Three, does; but it features nonlinearity by interweaving multiple chapters, i.e. constantly placing clues required in one chapter in another one, while also providing a logical path for the player to realize the clue belongs to another chapter, e.g. the chimney running along the outside of the dollhouse from the kitchen to the study, or the speaker running from the maritime room to the curiosity room. But the logicality also made the game easier to complete, at least for me (there was even 1 trading card left to drop when I completed the game), so I hope future titles are slightly longer while keeping the similar logicality and nonlinear structure.
SG win:
The good
The game blends light elements from multiple genres, resulting in an experience that is, as far as I can tell, quite unlike anything else:
- base building / resource management / economy
- puzzle
- automation
- RPG
I also enjoyed the cute pixel art.
The bad
- Maybe it's because I'm bad at the resource management genre, but the reverse difficulty curve really threw me off at first. I lost 3 runs before finally completing the 4th, because I kept going bankrupt and failing to pay off my debt at the start.
- Traveling can be tedious at times. When you are driving a slower ship model and/or run into a storm, it's frustrating to watch the little ship icon crawling slowly on the map. I think it'd work better if the icon moves at the same speed, while only raising the fuel consumption rate.
Aside from early titles such as Half Life, this is actually my first modern "boomer shooter" that pays homage to older FPS designs. It's a rich genre the history of which I know little of, but I can say I enjoyed it greatly despite lacking much cultural context. The gunplay feels satisfying, the enemy variety is great and the level design is complex and rich enough that there're still much left for me to explore and discover after beating the main campaign. I'll definitely continue playing it every once in a while, looking to complete the game.
The second installment of New Blood Interactive's FPS trilogy, after DUSK. I enjoyed this one even more, somehow much more, than DUSK, which I already enjoyed immensely.
The good
- The maps feature incredible verticality, and combined with the absence of fall damage, it can be very satisfying to explore them
- The visuals are stunning, even without RT on my Steam Deck
- Because the player character uses magical weapons instead of firearms, those projectiles travel much slower than the bullets in most FPS games I've played. It constantly feels like I'm throwing objects at enemies with formidable strength and precision, and makes hitscan FPS games feel much less satisfying for me.
- Each chapter introduces different enemies, and not long after playing, I could develop an intuition for which weapon's traits work best against which enemies' traits, which felt incredibly rewarding
The bad
Some bosses left much to be desired, mechanics-wise. Most notably for me:
- The Solar Saint. I can enter Soul Mode and destroy the boss within 20 seconds, without even giving them a chance to attack me once.
- Evil. There are four mana fountains in the arena for the four different mana types, from which both Evil and the player character draw mana. Evil will always draw from the fountain the player character is standing the closest to, and the player can easily exploit this by standing next to the blue fountain, which corresponds to the weakest boss attack pattern.
A very endearing metroidvania, short and charming. The writing and humor are pretty solid, the controls are tight, and I loved the visual style. Nothing bad for me, but also nothing outstanding or groundbreaking.
One of my favorite and most memorable indie games in recent memory, it's a lovely combination of stealth and puzzle solving. Next up I'm going to complete it and also buy Heat Signature from the same dev while it's on sale.
Also the achievements are hilarious for me.
SG win:
At first I was slightly turned off by how illogical and absurd the solutions to the puzzles often were, but very quickly I adapted to the goofy humor and got surprisingly good at coming up with the exact silly solution the game had in mind. The story is nothing noteworthy but the characters are lovable, due in no small part to the great voice acting and writer(s)' sense of humor, which I loved.
Hello there, fellow backlog assassins! I’m new here, so I figured I’d do a short backlog overview, an assassination plan, and my June report.
Backlog overview
I’m currently sitting at 277 games, 60% never played, 25% finished. I’ve only seriously gotten into PC gaming since buying the steam deck, so it’s a relatively small library that’s been collecting dust.
Assassination plan
While I don’t want gaming to be a burden where I’m always stressed about the backlog instead of playing whatever I want, I also would love to play those unplayed games somehow. And let’s be honest, without some conscious effort, I’ll never get to the vast majority of games that I keep telling myself I’ll play someday.
So my plan is simple and not very stressful.
- I made three BLAEO lists that make up the pipeline: unplayed and up next, unfinished and currently beating, already beaten and to be completed. In principle each lists shouldn’t exceed 10 games.
- Each month / year, write a monthly / yearly report on BLAEO
June report
Beaten
Been sitting in my WL for long because I couldn’t justify the price, and finally picked it up as part of HB’s Pixel Pride bundle. 100%’d it in 3 hours and loved the humor, pixel art, novel mechanics, and the characters.
I also played…
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Complete Edition
I tried it this Jan but couldn’t get into it. Tried it again in May and once I started the Bloody Baron quests in Velen, things got much more engaging and I couldn’t put it down. In fact, TW3 took up most of my gaming time in June. I’m aiming to beat it in July or August at the latest, but since I’m doing every side quest and contract available, it sure is gonna take a while.
Another one that I started long (this time, years) ago but never made much progress, but this time because I can’t handle the difficulty. I only managed to finally defeat The Soul Master during this June.
…and some noob questions!
I’ve been checking out BLAEO’s activities feed and many users’ reports feature bar graphs of their backlogs grouped by progress, steam links that have thumbnails/personal play time/personal achievement progress, expandable sections where they write longer review sections, etc. How can I use these features when writing BLAEO posts? Becuase as far as I can tell, it’s just a flavor of markdown and I’ve no idea how to achieve these bells and whistles.
I’ll post the question in the BLAEO recuitment thread on SG if I don’t get any answers here. Anyways, that’s it for my first post. Thank you for having me here :)
| 435 | games |
| 58% | never played |
| 22% | unfinished |
| 10% | beaten |
| 9% | completed |
| 2% | won't play |