Steam World Dig 2 (XB1X)

Played it using Xbox Game Pass. Fun game overall, especially the first half. Platformer with Metroidvania elements. Unfortunately the second half did not feel as well paced. It took me about 10 hours and the first 7 or so hours I really liked how the upgrades were spaced out and the progression felt really good. Then it felt like I got bombarded with a whole series of really powerful game changing upgrades (mostly as part of the story progression) in the final few hours.

Fun, but not enough to drive me on to fully 100% the game by finding all secrets and completing all challenge caves. I'll just leave this one at story complete. One tip though to anyone about to play it, don't worry too much about doing the challenge caves as you find them...the final few upgrades you get are so powerful that you should wait until you have them all near the end.

Chook & Sosig: Walk the Plank

Presentation: This is the most striking feature of the game. I really like the dev, Tooki Palooki, as an artist, the cartoony style is original and truly awesome, the backgrounds are colorful, detailed and very pleasing to the eye. I can't imagine how much work must have gone into the graphics. The animations are simple but funny. The soundtrack by Nathan Cleary Music! is good (maybe not the most memorable one I've ever heard, but quite enjoyable and fitting for a comical adventure game about pirates). There are no voiceovers apart from occasional character-specific gibberish sounds, but it works well enough.

Story and Characters: The game uses a set of peculiar characters from previous freeware/PWYW games or demos by the dev that you can download from itch.io (I especially recommend the CYOA/visual novel Chook and Sosig). You don't need to have played any of the other titles, the game shortly introduces these characters at the beginning, but they can feel a bit random, I guess, and even more so if you've never met them before. The premise of the story is that these characters are sitting around a table, playing a pen and paper RPG about pirates, and what happens in this P&P session is the actual game, with Sosig being the player character of the adventure and all others playing the roles of various NPCs that you meet (so they reappear in different guises). Occasionally the game shortly switches back to the table for the roleplayers to comment on things. Don't expect this to be a parody of RPG tropes though, it's its own thing and more about the characters. There is no actual plot apart from that, you just explore islands as a pirate and solve a couple of puzzles and there are two main goals, the accomplishing of either one ends the game (with a choice of 3+4 different finishing dialogues), but it wasn't perfectly clear to me that they will. As such, characters and story are amusing, but not all that memorable in the long run, it's more like casually playing around with a setting and seeing how specific characters behave in it. The setting and tasks do remind quite a bit of Monkey Island as is to be expected, but it's less intrusive than in your average point-and-click adventure hommage. There are no direct allusions to other games or out-of-character references to pop culture, its pretty consistent in its own universe.

Gameplay: It's a traditional point-and-click adventure with simplified UI. There's usually only one interaction per hotspot, if you don't count using items on it. So you just left-click on hotspots and that either means examining/commenting on them, using them or initiating a conversation, depending on how they were set up. Sometimes clicking on them repeatedly or at different stages in the game gives different results though. Part of the hotspots you can comment on, for example, offer 3-4 different comments, and after that it eithers start with the first comment again and you can cycle through all of them another time, or it sticks with the last comment for the rest of the game. You can never know which is which and will only find out by repeatedly clicking on hotspots, whether it's worth it or not. There is an inventory and items can be used with the environment by dragging them onto hotspots while holding the left mouse button; right-clicking gives a short description (so contrary to hotspots, items allow "examine" and "use" at the same time; I think it's the only specific use for the right mouse button).

Due to the simplified approach and the limited scope of the game, puzzles for the most part are really easy for seasoned adventure gamers, and probably not that challenging for beginners either. Nevertheless, I made use of the in-game hint system a few times, because the simplified approach also lead to me overlooking a few things because I thought I had already exhausted all options but sometimes reactions change under different circumstances (there's a lot of backtracking/running to and fro between the same locations). If I understood correctly, I think the hint system offers general hints as well as specific solutions according to your current progress, but I also had to learn it doesn't always help you out in every situation. There was also one instance where a tiny detail changed, allowing an object that was only examinable before to be picked up later on, without any clear hint or in-game reason but time having passed, so you could only notice it by visiting the same locations repeatedly and paying attention to details. Personally I consider that to be a cardinal sin of adventure game puzzle design, but to be fair, it was only this one instance. In the tradition of more recent P&C adventures, pressing the spacebar reveals all hotspots in the proximity, but it comes at the cost of first having to watch a slow animation of Chook wandering over the screen every time, and then the revealed hotspots quickly vanish again after a second or two. At this stage, it's also not completely reliable, occasionally omitting some hotspots, which can lead to overlooking puzzle solutions as well. Hopefully this will still get fixed with a future patch.

Technical: As mentioned, the game could do with another coat of polish. It's working and quite impressive already for game made by one single person with only marginal help by others, I assume. But there are still the occasional typos, missing, wrong or duplicate words in the dialogue texts and a few missing tokens for hotspots. The game was made with Unity, and my main issue on the technical side were the comparatively long loading screens - they alternated between longer and shorter loading times, it probably depends on your rig as well and other factors like current memory, but it was quite noticeable, and particularly a bit disruptive in the scenes when the game would switch from the pirate adventure back to the P&P table in order for the characters to quickly comment on a situation. I felt like a lot of the momentum or timing in these comments was lost due to the interruption of a few seconds loading screen, sadly.

The game has an autosave function in addition to offering three slots for manual saving. If you finish the game, after the credits the game goes back to the start menu, but Continue (that is loading the last autosave) is absent from that menu, and the Load button doesn't work. At first I thought this meant that completing the game erases all savegames and you'd have to replay the whole thing in order to see different endings, but quitting and starting the program again made the options to Continue and Load re-appear. So I didn't have to start from scratch, but I had to quit and re-run the program each time after the credits in order to reload and try a different choice at the end.

TL:DR
Enjoyable but ultimately not very memorable story with amusing, but somewhat random seeming characters, mostly easy in the puzzle department because of limited scope and simplified interface, but it's possible to get stuck in it regardless due to some shortcomings. On the technical side not perfect, and could do with a last round of minor polish (hopefully a patch will fix typos and a few missing hotspot tokens). But the presentation is utterly charming and the dev totally deserves the money for her work. If you've played and enjoyed Chook & Sosig and want something like that as a short point-and-click adventure game (2-3 hours), you won't be disappointed.

Finished Trine 3 yesterday. It was really enjoyable even though the 3D does bring much. It was annoying in a few spots but not too often. The story is interesting but it ends on a cliffhanger (which won't be continued in Trine 4).

~8h well spent for me.

Full list here.

Had fun with far cry 5 and new dawn. Great universe

Just few minutes ago, after having it pretty long time on my backlog, I've finished my 5th game this year. Hyperdimension Neptunia VII on my PS4. My first playthrough ended with the most common Ascension Ending. The game is IMO much better than all previous installments. Cut-scenes are shorter, gameplay is more refined, sending out scouts is more user friendly. Can't wait for the release of Super Neptunia RPG in few days. I can only recommend, if you are into that kind of jRPGs ;)

I just hope these two games get sooner or later into GOG catalogue as well.

If you are curious, all my games finishes this year are >>HERE<<

Finished Batman: Arkham Knight on PS4 earlier today.

I'll start with a really shitty thing: my experience with the game was largely overshadowed by how they handled the ending here. Once you're done with the main story the credits don't roll, no, you actually have to do a certain thing that formally concludes the game afterwards and here are the problems: to even get that option you must have finished a shitload of the seemingly optional missions and those don't automatically appear on the map, no, you actually have to explore the city yourself to find all of them which is boring and exhausting as hell. And to get the full ending you must actually clear the game 100%. That includes solving all 243 Riddler puzzles (which luckily do all appear on the map if you interrogate enough of Riddler's goons). I can't even begin describe how frustrating that is if you just want to see the God damn ending. So my last 10+ hours with the game were torture.

And here's the thing: the ending you get for just finishing the main mission is great, no serious complaints here. But the ending you get for doing most of the side missions is a kick in the nuts, some serious trolling by the developers. So yeah, you really must do 100% if you don't want to throw your controller at the screen - but even the 100% ending is not even remotely worth the effort it takes to unlock it. Like, seriously, THAT one still deserves some clarification that you should get for torturing yourself through 100% completion. Anyway, let's pretend I didn't just waste a dozen hours of my life on this shitty ending stuff...

The game is pretty great. I think it's a bit worse than Arkham City but still better than Arkham Asylum. It basically has everything Arkham City had plus a few minor additions and the Batmobile. The latter isn't that great but being someone who loves vehicle sections I'm not really complaining either and don't quite get the hate at the Batmobile gameplay I've seen online and in reviews - sure, the Batmobile missions feel quite forced but they generally aren't bad either as far as I'm concerned. I think the predator challenges are the worst in the series, though. Most of them take place on top of buildings and that sucks because you can always escape if you get caught which renders them super easy. There are some interiors in the game as well but there's not that many of those and the ones that are there feel worse than in the earlier games to me. But besides that the game is great. The combat is still immensely satisfying and the the story is quite amazing - the stakes have never been higher in the series. You can see the main twist from a mile away but luckily the story has a lot of other stuff going for it.

SUPERHOT VR (PSVR)

This is a FPS game where time only moves when you move, making it lean more into a puzzle game rather than a twitchy action game.

I have never played the flat version, but the game is amazing in VR even though you cannot walk. It's not an easy game, but it makes you feel like a real badass whenever you complete a segment.

My main complaint is similar to the complaint I had with Transpose: throwing of objects is sometimes required and I obviously suck at throwing because I will hit where I'm aiming when I throw something only maybe 25% of the time (and these are big, man-sized targets!)

Otherwise the game is great, except that it's pretty short (a few hours at most to complete the main game), although there are additional challenges and endless mode unlocked afterwards.

Definitely recommended!

I'm probably the only guy on the planet who liked that. Then again I love getting 100% in the Arkham series so it's not like I wasn't going to do it anyway.

Phantasmagoria. I had played part of this when it first came out (maybe it was a demo, I forget) and I needed something easy and relaxing to play and this did the trick well enough. It's a haunted house story in which you control a female author (who apparently only has one set of clothes) who just moved into a really strange house (seriously, why would any normal person move into a place that looks like that?) with her photographer husband, who becomes possessed and starts acting very badly. It's got its issues but I had a good time.

For a Sierra game, it's pretty laidback. There are puzzles but they're generally very straightforward (e.g., need to get past a guard dog? Give him the bone the general store was giving away for free), and it's impossible to get killed until the seventh, final chapter. That last chapter can be frustrating, though, and it's largely to do with a nasty save game bug. I was cruising along and got killed in ch. 7, and the game auto-saved while I was stuck in a walking dead situation (the helpful in-game hint system informed that I needed an item that I could no longer get). I exited and reloaded to find that my save game was ruined. Fortunately, the game allows you to start from any chapter, so I restarted ch. 7, but now I needed another item (got stuck in a second walking dead state) which was located in an area I'd never found because its entrance is hidden in a place you would have no reason to examine. Then that save game went bad, so I restarted again, and this time I was able to complete the game. It's strange that Sierra went with a system that allows you only a single save per game considering they helped popularize the "save early, save often" concept in adventure games.

I suppose the reason the game is remembered good or bad is because of its classic FMV style. For a mid-90s video game it's lavishly produced, but by standards of just about any other live action media it's borderline amateurish. The actors are agreeable but none of them seem to have had major careers. It's all green-screen filming with almost no real foley work, so it has a feeling of woodenness and unreality even in mundane situations, which probably put even more pressure on the actors than they already had (we saw what happened to even very good actors when they got put into the Star Wars prequels...).

A little past midway through, it starts getting violent and gory. The gore is very interesting to me because for such a limited production, they really went for it when it came to the death scenes. The game loves really violent head trauma in various forms and it's actually pretty effective once it's filtered through the game's low resolution. It doesn't look very realistic, and the more you see it the funnier it looks, but I have to admit I didn't expect to see a straight-on close-up of a woman's face being rapidly torn in half right off her skull, but there it is. The 90s were a funny time in video games.

Journey

I'll just link to my review of ABZU here, and if you replace "swimming/diving" with "walking/skating/flying" and skip that part about the credits, it's pretty much what I would write about Journey. ABZÛ was available on PC earlier than Journey, so I played it first, but of course Journey is the original and ABZÛ is like an inofficial Journey 2, replacing sand and snow desert with an underwater setting. The background stories are strikingly similar as well.

What sets Journey apart is the multiplayer element. In the two hours of my playthrough (split between two evenings) I only met two other players: the encounter with the first one was just casual, before we went back to our single player routine, with the second one, after I ran into them a second time, I decided to stick and we finished the game together. The possibilities to interact with other players are quite limited, and at first I thought, it wouldn't really add anything to the game, but later I found out it actually is kind of cool to play the game together with a silent stranger, it adds another layer to the narrative if you make the journey together and look out for each other, and it also offers a certain benefit regarding the gameplay mechanics, but it's more fun to find that out yourself, so I won't explain here.

Like with ABZÛ (and despite already having played ABZÛ) I enjoyed the game very much and did not regret buying it, regardless of the short length.

Cryostasis

Originally tried playing it many years ago on a Core 2 Duo + 8800GT and it ... did not run very well. Now saw Austrobogulator mention that he liked this game in the What Is This Game thread, so decided to check it out on my current system. It ran better of course, but still far far poorer than it should've. Still it was playable, until the last third where for whatever reason it was crashing to desktop left and right. Eventually I reduced most of the graphics settings and set the resolution to 1280x720 and that seemed to help, and I managed to actually finish it.

Aside from all the technical difficulties, it really is a nice game, though the supernatural side of the story has me all kinds of confused about wtf was happening there.
The way I figure it, hard to get "true endings" are what youtube is for. Not to find out how to get them, but to simply watch them after you're done playing the game the way that you enjoy.

Far Cry New Dawn

After "completing" Stardew Valley, I poked here and there at games, but nothing really kept my attention. Then there was that sale at Ubisoft, and Far Cry New Dawn was at a really affordable price for what I had heard about it. So I caved in, cursing myself for always buying new games and having a backlog I'll be able to pass on to my children... if I have any one day.

I was wrong.

I loved Far Cry 5. Really loved. What I had heard about New Dawn, hitpoints, life bars, tiered ennemies, short story, really kept me from buying it. Boy, do I regret not playing it earlier!

Let's get the bad things out of the way immediately. Yes, the scenario is bad. Like, really. Far Cry 5's scenario was a masterpiece compared to it. There are enough holes in the plot of New Dawn to make a swiss cheese jealous. And it is not counting the times I could have taken out the evil twins (the game's baddies), it was quite infuriating, to be honest.

But. I wasn't playing New Dawn for the scenario, to be honest. I knew it would be cheesy at best. No, I played it for the graphics, for the action and for the atmosphere. And yes, New Danw more than delivers in those domains. It's beautiful (for a post-atomic world), it's fast paced, and you get to meet again old acquaintances from Far Cry 5 (even if your character is totally different from Far Cry 5).

So, I'm not a completionist, so I don't have all the elite weapons, I haven't done all the challenges, all the hidden treasures spots and so on. But after beating the final boss and making some choices, I feel it's complete.

But I want more. If Ubisoft ever continues the "Hope county" universe, I think I'll dive again, without restrictions!

So far in 2019: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2019/post24

GTA - Vice City Stories and Liberty City Stories

Used my old PS2 copies to emulate on PC, god bless savestates, they make some missions less infuriating.
Focused on main missions only. Skipped side activities.

I can't stomatch modern GTA games (IV and V), then reminded myself that I always wanted to play Stories subserie.
Tried their PSP versions and technically - they were a mess. Then bough cheap PS2 version to emulate. Much better but still - it was PSP port. You will know that when you play as a shooter in driving sections. Left stick to aim? Who though it was good idea? And sensitivity was garbage, on both PSP and emulated in PS2. I hate first person shooting on consoles and that was just another example. I can use pad for pretty much anything else beside this.

Back to the game - VCS was marvelous. Great characters, story and gameplay. I liked business system where you conquer other rivals to take their business nest, upgrade to the max and not worry about attacks.
Just remember to get back to safehouse, save and load to cool down angry gangs. Or you get a taste of "passanger rate of fire bug" where even Boy George clone armed with terrible SMG turn into killing machine on passanger seat...
Other famous people in VCS? Yeah, a Phill Collins, no less. You get easy mission to keep safety on his concert. That was simply but great mission, despite being old - it still left me with good impression.
At the same time I feel like that mission is a reason why you can't get VCS in digital distribution anymore...

Autoaim is both good and bad. Manual aim in VC and GTA3 was awful, crosshair was just painted thing on your screen that don't work 100% where you aim. Autoaim made huge fights trivial but can deceive you if you get in the bad position.
Sometimes it focus on enemies behind the cover. Sometimes it focus on noncombatants. Sometimes camera is badly positioned and autoaim doesn't work.

LCS on the other hand... it's not good.
Lemme tell ya, I'm a guy who grown up in '90 but the way they were portrayed in both GTA3 and LCS - it was bad and tasteless and terrible as a parody/pastige.
Main character was a litttle upgrade from mute protagonist in GTA3 but still far from VCS level.

Some missions were tricky if you wanted to blast through, even if you find a trick to deal with them they still can be challenging.

Oh and vehicles spawn in LCS is horrendous, it makes some missions artificially hard. Nothing worse that breaking your fast car (that you need it) on constantly spawning cars behind the corners out of thin air.

Sacred: Gold - I played it once with a vampiress but it was rushed playthrough which probably took less than 10 hours and I didn't even bother with Underworld campaign. This time I chose battlemage and tbh it was much more enjoyable, I did most of the sidequests and carried out a hearty bit of exploration.

Sacred is a decent hack&slash with big and a bit empty open world to explore. There are plenty of quests to perform although their quality varies from poor to decent, with majority being fetch x, kill x amount or find a person quests. There are variety of classes to choose from and each play a bit different. Main storyline is a bit cliche but it does its job of pushing you toward different regions of the map. Other than that its what one would expect from a h&s: plenty of monsters to slay, skills to raise, items to find and levels to gain.

Underworld expansion was a bit disappointing. Storyline feels rushed and a bit forced, the world is even more empty and the ending inconclusive (after the final boss you are basically told to start the game again, without any conclusion to the storyline).

Overall a 7/10, I would recommend it for any fan of hack&slash games.


Akalabeth: World of Doom (1998) aka Ultima 0 - not much to say here, I played it mostly out of curiosity and as a beginning of my personal epic quest to play through the whole Ultima and M&M series. With magic amulet exploit it took me less than an hour to finish, so one could say I cheated.

I can't really recommend it other than for the sake of curiosity.

Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa. It's an NES (well, Famicom, really) platforming game in which you control a baby with a magical rattle that basically turns enemies into balloons that you can either ride on for a short while, or kick them into other enemies. It's very cute and whimsical. In a couple of levels, instead of platforming, you literally eat your way through giant cakes and stuff. Another level appears to take place on a giant circuit board.

The bottom line is that this game was made by Konami, which in the NES era meant guaranteed quality. The graphics, sound, and music are very good, and the game generally controls very well aside from trying to knock enemies at an angle, which I never quite got a good handle on.

It's pretty easy to start off, but turns into a decent, if somewhat cheap, challenge toward the end. There are 7 worlds, each of which has 3 levels. There are no mid-level checkpoints, so if you die it's back to the beginning of the level. You get infinite continues, but if you lose all lives you start back on level 1 of the world. This all means that you'll get well acquainted with level layouts and enemy placements by the time you get through the harder levels, but taking cheap deaths or being done in by threats you haven't seen before can be especially frustrating when you get deep into level 3 of a particular world, because failure means you get to replay a lot of stuff you've suffered through before. One of the later levels requires you to drop down a long vertical shaft, potentially losing health on spikes you have no way of knowing about ahead of time unless you've tried the level before. Thankfully, the levels are actually pretty short, but I came close to throwing my controller a couple of times and bitterly cursed the developers after I beat the game, which is how beating many games of the time went.