Finished Prey (2017), what an extraordinary game! Awesome gameplay mechanics, great atmosphere, excellent storyline, game is very non-linear - not only offering different endings and scenarios, but most of quests can be approached in many different ways. Great mixture of sci-fi horror, cyberpunk elements, multiple nods to genre’s classics. It’s Alien meets System Shock. So far the best game of 2017 for me. Oh and it also is well optimized - I managed to run it very well on a PC which is waaay below minimum specs. I recommend this game to all ppl, not just fans of shooters (I myself am not a fan of FPSes and I had a blast playing this game nonetheless).

In other news - seems that my backlog fighting days may be over. I just bought Binding of Isaac Rebirth + Afterbirth DLC on recent sale so many many hours gonna be sunk into a game that cannot be finished ;p

Finished Phantom Brave PC Mian Story - there are also additional storylines and NewGame+ sort of but they are all just immensive amounts of grind so maybe I will play every now and then, but not gonna focus solely on that. As for the game - it’s very veeery weird one, even for jRPG crazy standards.

It’s a little modified DS port and it can be seen. While all 2D backgrounds got updated to higher resolutions and they look truly amazing, 3D textures and 2D animated character models only got slightly filtered and they look really poor in high res on PC. Another thing is the story - I generally don’t mind jRPG less serious approach to storylines, but here peroblem lies elsewhere. Story is soo plain, stupid and naive it leaves me speechless. It is stupid and naive even for much lower doujin jRPG standards. It’s on the level of kindergarden naiveness and serves just as an excuse for next maps. I had much more fun playing long random dungeons where there was no story between stages than playing story mode and reading one stupid cliche after another.

Now with bad stuff behind us, let’s get to one thing that saves the game - it’s absolutelly unique game mechanics. Game takes known formula of tactics turn-based jRPG but absolutelly elevates it with loads of unique mechanics. First of all you don’t have a party, you only have your main Chroma character and she can summon “Phantoms” - ghosts that will fight for a while on battle before returning to land of the dead. But you cannot just summon them, you gotta confine them into real-world objects - trees, rocks or even sword you threw on the ground, different objects give different stats modifications, also there are way over a hundred of different phantoms (“jobs”) to unlock, each with unique abilities, there are also various kinds of equipment. Phantoms, equipment and skills all can be separatelly grinded and levelled up, they can be combined, where at cost of destroying phantom/item you boost other one and give it it’s stats, there are unique combination, secret unlockables, hidden titles and probably a lot of stuff I didn’t even found yet. Does it sound complicated? Well it is hella complicated, so if you are looking for easy game with easy to understand mechanics - stay away. But if you are looking for something that will opn one hand require a lot of trial-error or reading through shitload of online guides, but at the other hand will provide you absolutelly unique experience with hundreds if not thousands of strategies you can come up with on your own - then despite all flaws Phantom Brave PC is worth it just for it’s mechanic uniqueness.

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Not sure what will be my next game I try to beat - I will now try out Prey, but I am not sure if my old machine will be able to handle it so not sure if I will be able to finish it :>

EDIT: With a little bit of .cfg modification magic I managed to make Prey running at stable 50+ FPS with acceptable 1600x900 res, despite being way below minimum requirement specs :D: So Prey is now officially my next game to beat :D:

Hmm, was updating my progress for a while but me being a lazy noob never realized I can write progress posts as well ;p
So in this week:

FINALLY finished Tyranny - very mixed feelings. Almost everything about this game is perfect beside one thing, but this one thing is major and almost ruins it. Game has awesome climate, lore and story. World is well crafted and quite unique. Dialogues, many many consequences, using your stats in dialogues etc are also one of the best I’ve seen - basically you could replay game 3-4 times and see almost nothing of the same stuff. Game also gives a lot of unique mechanics, while most of other oldschool isometric RPGs are basically clones of BG/PT/ID stuff, here we get many new ideas, like levelling equipment, reputation system that is finally meaningfull, factions that actually matters, creating own spells and many many others. So why do I have problem with it? One word. PERFORMANCE. Game doesn’t look too impressive graphically-wise (I’d say it’s uglier that PoE, Original Sin or new Torment) yet it runs like total crap. Even with such graphics it can stutter, locations are small yet they load forever, even if you enter small room it will be loading for like 2-3 minutes, any bigger map like small village will be loading 4-5min and with small locations you can imagine theres lots of loading (this small village will have 5 houses you can enter, so going there will be like 10-15mins apent on loading houses, 20-30 min loading village up each time again, so you spend 30-45 min on loading screens for one village you otherwise would fully explore in 15-20min…) Not to mention loading savegame if you screwed sth up. If not for these loadings i would be playing Tyranny all the time, because of them I have enough after 3h (meaning 2h game, 1h waiting for loading screens), get frustrated and quit. Luckilly locations in Act II and III don’t have so many sub-locations so not so many loading times (but as you fight more bosses more loading times forloading save file when you die). If Obsidian optimised game correctly Tyranny would be the best isometric RPG on Steam, as it is it’s not even in top 3 beside it’s massive potential.

Got bad karma ending in Karma. Incarnation 1 - Loved artstyle and animation, gameplay-wise it was ok, yet some portions required clicking basically everything on screen. I intentionally was going for bad karma ending to see what happens and that was a bad choice. You see - in this game you cannot save at all, it autosaves when you quit it. And bad karma ending brings you back to beggining to do whole game once more (and since no saving you cannot load), which is kinda stupid as all puzzles are the same and playing again qould feel like a waste of time. Also it’s supposed to be only episode 1 and ep 2 is unlikelly to come. Still worth playing just for how amazing and unique it looks thou - just don’t go for bad karma ending ;p

Completed 100% Highschool Romance - I played Highschool Posession from same dev before and loved it. Highschool Romance has more plot, more options and routes, more CGs, but personally I prefer Posession. Simply because I didn’t really like any of the girls in Romance and if you don’t like any girl in VN it’s not gonna be great. But it’s personal preference, for someone who didn’t like girls in Posession this may be much better :>

Now starting to play another long game - Phantom Brave PC :>