Shadaik's Battle of the Backlog

shadaik · September 8, 2023

Hello and welcome to my accountability check!

I amassed quite the collection of games I never played and I think I need to remedy that. I do tend to enjoy writing about my experiences and so, I hatched the perfect plan to wittle that list down: Make a "trophy checklist"! Brilliant! Let's see how quick I abandon that plan.

Games can be wonderful or terrible experiences, but they ought to be experienced in order to become either. Them just sitting there seems like a loss.

Plus, my download lists are becoming too large to find stuff easily, especially the endlessly scrolling lists on PS3 and Vita.

How did I get here?

Hoarding of games is nothing new for me. Add to that trophies making me hesitate to start a game I know will take a lot of time to finish, and you got a perfect storm of a cluttered collection.

PS Plus is a major factor here. Taking the one I have numbers for, on PS4, 224 games in my backlog are from PS Plus.

As time went on, free games became much more frequent, the PS Plus Essentials came way fast than I would finish them, more frequent and lower discounts, and then Extra happened. I don't count Extra games unless I started them, but they are there, and I will often enough start one of them up, adding them onto the pile.

How this'll go

I have a sort of schedule. Usually my hunting goes like this:

During the week, I will pick one or two trophies to go for each evening. Usually quick ones to knock off the list of unearned ones and increase my completion rate, though I might also cruise a grind for a bit. On weekends, I will tackle larger goals such as completing games, going for plats, or starting new ones. Occassionally, I will cluster games into projects (e.g. I'm trying to do the three missing Wonderbook games in one go).

Sunday evening (CEST), I will come here and give my impressions of what I finished the week before. I might give that twice if a game has both a plat and DLC.

Games will be subtracted from the list if they are 100% or if the remaining trophies become unobtainable. Games that reached 100% but are still expecting more DLC to be added (i.e. Genshin Impact, Minecraft) will not be re-added on account of my sanity. I might remove one stack in favour of another for games I have not yet started.

I will not stop buying games, because all in all, I value having games that interest me more than having a smaller backlog, but I do expect my list to get shorter over time. Yet, it will probably slow down, as I go for quick and easy ones first and the longer this goes, the longer the games are going to be to beat.

From here on out, then, I'll document the ebb and flow of my backlog. What I got done and how I liked it, what I added and why.

Current backlog (updated weekly)

PS3: 163 (+1)

Vita: 88 (+3)

PS4: 428 (+8)

16 of these are VR. PS4 list includes some titles without trophies (like P.T.) and, unlike the other numbers, also includes games I already started but did not yet finish. At least the feature to hide games from the list of purchases makes counting easier. I do that to all games I finished.

PS5: 82 (+30)

I don't even have a PS5 (yet), this is all from cross-buys, PS Plus Essential, and adding free games to the library. Of these, 6 are autopops of games I have on PS4, 3 of which I already finished (Forbidden West, Miles Morales, No Man's Sky), though there is DLC left on Forbidden West. So, this part of the log is probably only increasing for some time.

Currently done (updated weekly)

150 Platinums (+44)

92 Non-Plat 100% (+16)

230 Total 100%(+57)

Reviewed So Far

Find a full list of games I reviewed on PSNP behind the spoiler toggle:

Spoiler

36 Fragments of Midnight

Access Denied

Adam's Venture: Origins

AER: Memories of Old

Arrog

Attack of the Toy Tanks

Big Dipper

Bigfoot's Journey

Black Mirror

Broken Sword 5: The Serpent's Curse

Doctor Who: The Lonely Assassin

Dreaming Sarah

Endling: Extinction is Forever

Fall Guys

Foamstars

Foreclosed

Game of Thrones (Telltale)

Headbangers in Holiday Hell

Hue

InFamous 2

Invizimals: The Lost Kingdom

Jisei: The First Case

Knightin+

Learn Hiragana/Lear Katakana

Lego Legends of Chima

Lego Worlds

Light Dark

Lost Words: Beyond the Page

Lydia

Marsi's Adventure

Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales

Minecraft: Playstation 3 Edition

Minecraft: Playstation Vita Edition (100%) and Platinum

My Little Pony: A Maretime Bay Adventure

Playstation Vita Pets

Sam&Max: The Devil's Playhouse

Santa's Monster Shootout

Syrup and the Ultimate Sweet

The Light in the Darkness

The Voices: Stories

Woodle Tree Adventures

Zero Zero Zero Zero

Edited April 28 by shadaik

shadaik · September 10, 2023

Alright, ended up starting this with a weird week, but here we go:

A few titles leave the backlog for reasons othe rthan beating them. I promise I do not make this a regular thing.

Crysis 3 (PS3) gets kicked because the plat became unobtainable.

Puzzle Journey (PS4, two stacks) - now this one is a free game that came out this week. It's Memory. I tried it on an alt account and while I popped almost all trophies on the first attempt each on there, the highest difficulty was just beyond me. In the end I decided, I had not paid any money for it and the game was not enjoyable at all, so better just remove that as if it had never been here. I have better things to do than invest time and effort in an unenjoyable plat that is not even rare enough to make up for it.

Other than those two oddities, a weekend with phenomenal weather resulted in me not playing all that much, but I did get one new plat and 100%:

Plat #106 - 100% #173

Tchia

New Caledonian

Collect all trophies

There are many ways one can decribe a plat. One i have not yet come across is "stubborn".

Tchia is a stubborn platinum.

The game itself is good. Not great, but good. If not for the trophies, it's a solid 7/10. I enjoy seeing games based in less frequently seen cultural contexts, especially fantasy based on more obscure mythologies. Here we have one that pops up every now and then, the old religions of the Pacific island nations, specifically the French colony of New Caledonia just East off Australia. Even more specifically, the Tiga and Maré islands as well as most of Lifou. In case you were wondering why the in-game map looks nothing like New Caledonia - because the map does not encompass the main island but parts of the island chain to the East on the map.

There is a lot of local feel here, from the islands themselves to the languages spoken - no translation convention here, everything is in a mix of French and Dehu (local language of Lifou), depending on the speaker, with translated subtitles. Our adversary is very much something that feels like a demon from Pacifican tales, though I don't know if Meavora is from one of those or an original invention of the game. Meavora has supplanted the legitimate king and queen of the islands and now controls the islands using magical agents made from cloth. Our hero, 12-year-old Tchia, has been living on an isolated island off the two main ones all her life and knew little about all this until her father is abducted and she goes on a quest to find him again.

The gameplay reminded me a lot of Assassin's Creed II, of all things. Climbing and gliding is taken from Breath of the Wild. As an original twist, Tchia can possess animals and small objects to use their abilities for herself and reach hard-to-reach places - if there are any near, which happens to be the case rarer than I'd like. The result kinda works for a fine game.

But there are cracks to the game, a certain clunkiness. We have a framing device of this being a story told at an orphanage - and even after the ending, I have no idea, why. Maybe to soften the blow of a certain story beat I won't spoil? Likewise, we have a 12-year-old who has clearly not yet hit puberty (there is a joke hinging on that early on) get an extremely rushed love story. There's also the matter of friendship wit a woman who, upon first seeing Tchia, immediately empties a shotgun at her. A bizarre mix of a modern city and factories with cars and all (but no roads connecting them, making me wonder what purpose the cars serve) alongside a tribal fantasy world. Just a lot of clunkiness all around.

Aside from the main story, the islands are filled with side activities. Races are fun, especially when playing as an animal, even if the time limits are a bit tight. The totem shrines are great - obstacle courses that use unique takes on the gameplay seen nowhere else until they return once each in the final boss battle. There are diving boards that sadly get almost no explanation how they work, a nice treasure hunt that is so polished, it feels like that was the original game (treasure maps even deteriorate in quality according to the situation they were drawn in!), enemy camps to clear out and collectibles.

So what do I mean by stubborn? Thing is, the game is good if played normally. This would have been a great game for a platform without trophies, or for people who do not care about them. But after the story ends, getting everything needed for 100% is just an unpleasant kind of grind. The island gets progressively emptier (enemies do not spawn outside uncleared camps), the final few challenges can be frustrating (damn that parrot race), there is a claw machine that uses actual physics, and animals are too few and far between to be actually useful to skim over the large islands. Fast travel? Only at the harbors and only accessible while in a harbor. No, minor islands have no harbor and they can quite far out form the main islands. There are quite a few campfires, but those are not fast travel points, for some unfathomable reason. Need to get on top of a mountain? Go, climb up all the way from the beach.

The issue with Tchia is that it starts strong, carries itself well to the end (sequel-baity as it is), and then annoys those that decide to stay longer, leaving on a sour note. Speaking of notes: This was far too musical. Playing Guitar Hero out of the blue while reading subtitles at the same time is just not for me. And whose idea was it to put the "skip musical sequence" button on L3 when that sequence is being controlled using the left stick? Similarly, whose idea was it to put crouch (which makes you slower) and slide (which makes you faster downhill) on the same button? And that last one can't even be solved by re-assigning the buttons. The tedium of the endgame drags the game down to a 6 for me, and the frustration of some of the challenges to 100% and the one musical trophy raise the plat to a 4, imho.

Ending on a nice note, if you possess some birds, such as pidgeons, you get a poop button.

Game 6/10

Time 25 hours

Platinum 4/10

Edited September 10, 2023 by shadaik

Don_Chipotle · September 13, 2023

Tchia doesnt look that bad, but it doesnt look like my cup of tea, i liked stray even with many flaws the game has, even other similar stuff like concrete genie i liked it too, but even when the game has many colors and the game world looks alive, the game doesnt click with me.

Hope to check more about our backlog stories!

shadaik · September 17, 2023

On 9/13/2023 at 9:03 PM, Don_Chipotle said:

Tchia doesnt look that bad, but it doesnt look like my cup of tea, i liked stray even with many flaws the game has, even other similar stuff like concrete genie i liked it too, but even when the game has many colors and the game world looks alive, the game doesnt click with me.

Oh, I did like it, it's just an easy game to get fatigued on.

On to the new week:

Three trophyless titles and one non-plat finished this week. Of those, Deltarune doesn't really count as done, I just loaded it onto the Switch and deleted it off the PS4. But that does remove it from the Playstation backlog (and moves it into the next long train ride or flight). One game gets added to the backlog: Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2 joins the list. Love me a Lego game and this one was on a deep discount at 7.49. However, Lego games should not be played several in a row lest they become just too much of the same thing, so this'll still have to wait its turn. Other than that, I only got DLC for Maneater and Darksiders III to be able to 100% these games when I eventually get around to them.

A demo that wasn't even on the list was the one for Rising Hell. That one went the other way from what Deltarune did: Found it on Switch, loaded the demo on PS4.But it's worth talking about, I think:

Rising Hell (Demo - no trophies)

The full version has a plat, but this game is very obscure so I wanted to give it a spotlight. I rarely play demos as is.

Rising Hell is - I dunno what it is, actually. An action platformer? It feels like a metroidvania, but there is no sprawling map, instead you constantly rise up a tower, occassionally choosing between two destinations when the way up forks. The fighting the aesthetics, those are classic metroidvania. But that might be because of the topic: You are trying to escape hell by climbing its towers, so of course there is a lot of darkness and red and blood and demons to fight.

The demo is quite substantial and really fun. I'm sold on the game.

David Attenborough's First Life (no trophies)

I think this title is off the PSN store. Couldn't find it, anyway. Or an image of appropriate size.

I have taken it easy with the VR headset. Got one cheap by combining two defective ones into one working set and now I'm slowly trying out stuff to make sure I won't suffer from motion sickness. So far, it's been working out well, aside from one instance on Kingdom Hearts VR, where I completely freaked when the player character moved his arm into frame without me moving mine. The PSVR has a couple of free downloads that are good for that sort of dipping your toes, from vr movies to some actual games (Ministry of Time was fun and had that very specific Spanish goofiness that is nice to see)

DAFL was originally a museum exhibit on early multicellular life. You glide across a reef filled with prehistoric life. Vendian and Burgess fauna, for those who know what those words mean. This is very much a guided tour or a 3d film. I would have loved to be able to explore the reef freely, but alas, it's more of presentation, narrated by David Attenborough, aka "the voice of nature documentaries".

It's quite nice, just that little bit dated that is to be expected of an old museum presentation in a field that moves extremely quickly (evolutionary biology), but all in all a pleasant ride. I remember this costign more than it should while many similar titles are free, but it is a cozy experience.

Contrast

Non-Plat 100% #77, overall 100% #174

Two weeks ago, I played and didn't like a small game about child neglect, titled Lydia.

Contrast tackles a similar topic, though this time with less connection to alcohol and more to unplanned parenthood and how that interferes with career plans, all through the eyes of the child. Said child is Didi, a young girl, maybe twelve (between Lydia, Tchia, and Contrast, I seem to have hit an accidental stride with child characters), but we don't play as her, we play as her friend, a burlesque dancer named Dawn who has the ability to enter and exit the world of shadows. As in, literal shadows on the wall. In fact, every character but Didi and Dawn exist solely as shadows. This seems odd, but those two (and another character) apparently hail from another dimension from anybody else.

Didi's father has recently returned and her mother reluctantly agrees to let him fix a previous mess that lead to him being kicked out. Through memories and collectible snippets, we piece together what happened and help make things right so the family can get together again.

Weird interdimensional stuff aside, this game plays its simple story well. Over the course of a mere five hours, we learn what happened, how her father is making a new mess of trying to fix things because he lends money from the wrong people to do it and is generally prone to bad luck, and we fix it.

It's not the happy ending that makes this better than Lydia, in my opinion. It's the courage to adress the theme of parenthood and responsibility head-on, not afraid of leaving traditional ideas. A lot is hinted at, at all layers of the narrative.

Gameplay-wise this is a chill 3d puzzle platformer. The puzzles are easy, I only got stumped by one (the pirate ship), when the game started to expect the player to more actively shift between shadow and street realm. The noir style of many elements can be jarring even in the 1920's setting that should fit well with it, mostly because the subject matter is far from hardboiled detective stuff, shady money lending business aside. It might be a bit style over substance, but I find the substance to still be enough for a game this short. I played game sten times this long that had less to say.

Game 7/10

Time 4-5 hours

Difficulty 2/10

shadaik · September 24, 2023

After a long while, Tekken 7 is done!

Other than that, I turn out to be a sucker for punishment, why else would I have gotten back into Trove. But the game does not quite feel like a more pointless version of Minecraft anymore, so that is good. Minefield is getting on my nerves with giving out playing fields that get both me and actual Minesweeper solvers found online. But that one is only a matter of time. Maybe next week.

Plat #107 - 100% #175

Tekken 7

I’ll get Everything Back!

Acquired all trophies

It has been some time since I touched a fighting game (not counting brawlers and Smash Bros clones, I see those as their own things). Soul Calibur Lost Swords was the last one I remember playing and that was back in 2014. Weird, I used to play them a lot on the SNES and long after, all the way from Street Fighter II to Soul Calibur II. Tekken I last played on the PS1.

One of the fundamental genres of modern gaming, but relegated to a niche, but a very dedicated one. Soulslikes, bow down, here’s the genre that originally had the player rely on understanding enemy patterns and then beating them!

And, of course, they tend to make for great trophy screenshots.

Tekken 7 is considered an easy plat. 3/10 is about the upper limit of easy plats, but still. I don’t understand why, other than bias due to fighting games usually being played by people who specifically are good at them (kind of like happens with Shmups, too). However, I think difficulty ratings should be for basically an average gamer and for those, there will be a real challenge in one trophy: Master of Iron Fist is for finishing a special chapter that serves as a sort of epilogue of story mode, ending the story of special guest star Akuma (from Street Fighter).

That fight is just off. I feel it does not at all fit with any other fight in the game in terms of fighting style, Akuma tends to teleport around the player and either avoid attacks or circumventing blocks constantly. In the end, it turns out Akuma is very open to being kicked in the face and doing that whenever he tries to close in while keeping your distance will make him easy. But that is something one has to find out, so my difficulty assessment stands because difficulty is, in the end, all about how much one has to learn to beat it.

Doing 70 air damage was also tough to get on purpose, but eventually just plopped when I wasn’t even going for it. The combos presented in guides to the game are ridiculously complex strings of button presses that help little even if somebody manages to remember them. Honestly, just praying for it seems to do more than the guides do.

Story mode itself is as ridiculous as can be expected from Tekken. Akuma kinda fits better with this insanity than with the slightly (slightly!) more grounded Street Fighter series, even if he brings fireballs into the mix. Next to a squid alien, two bears, and a family that regularly chugs each other into volcanoes, a literal demon summoned to avenge somebody is nothing.

Online mode is fair, even when I run into somebody I don’t stand a chance against, it doesn’t tend to be a complete curbstomp. The game is good at letting you know every opponent can be beat if you go about it the right way.

The difficulty spike aside, this is a very accessible fighter, even if some of its oddities like the block system take some getting used to. Or it had just been too long since I last played one of these, that is also a distinct possibility. Still, a fun fighter all-in-all.

One hope I had when going for the last trophy, which was the one for playing ten online matches – that the one popping the trophy would be a win and the plat image would have the „You Win“ in it. Well, that turned out almost perfectly:

Aside from the hope the game would stop repeating its favorite catchphrase over and over: "Connection to opponent has been lost".

Game: 8/10

Difficulty: 5/10

Time: 14 hours

shadaik · October 1, 2023

And now for the first week that has the backlog grow!

Six new entries in the backlog, which happens to be the exact number of PS4 titles I have gotten off the list since I started it. Overall, that means the list stands at -1, thanks to Crysis 3's server shutdown making me drop it.

The new ones are:

Black Desert Online - the one game I did not get off PS Plus Essential at the start of the month. In the end, I decided it might be worthwhile. Seems to be a game I'll enjoy and will rotate in for some other multiplayer title when it's done.

Disney Speedstorm - finally went f2p, kart racers are always fun and this one has Disney characters. Ten years ago that would have been a warning sign, but licensed titles have gotten so much better with the current and previous generation of consoles. Plus, it's hard to actually screw up a kart racer. I even enjoyed the terribly reviewed Coffin Dodgers!

Sagebrush - this one I had on my "shortlist" from sales a few times and now decided to just add it, already.

Ord. - As someone who writes poetry and actually gets paid for it, this game piqued my interest. I don't know if it will be good, but it will certainly be interesting. I could pass this off as professional interest! This is so close to what I do for a living, it might be a tax write-off! But most of all, I hope it's actually good, of course. Even if it's not, at the very least it is intriguing.

Titan Chaser - If Ord. wasn't enough of a hint at that, I like games not fitting the mold of traditional games. Titan Chaser seems to be one of those misfits and is certainly interesting enough to have a look at.

That said, I did finish a game this week, just one that wasn't on the backlog: The Light in the Darkness has gotten a PS4 release this week and I played that. Only the PS5 version wason my backlog and will remain there until I get to play it.

Meanwhile, my attempt at Puzzle Journey was a bust. I thought myself clever trying to cheese it by noting down the known tiles on a piece of hgraph paper to get through Expert Mode. That did work, but took too much time, so I now have one trophy missing, technically adding this back into my backlog to even out getting back to zero. But I'll keep at that one!

Now for the actually finished game of the week:

Platinum #108 - 100% # 176

The Light in the Darkness

Collect all the trophies.

I've had an eye on Luc Bernard ever since his never released game about the holocaust, Imagination is the Only Escape for Nintendo DS. This has been somewhat easy because Bernard has an extremely striking and unique visual style that remained recognizable ove rthe years and even after this game switches his work from tiles to 3d models. I will come back to that.

Information about his unreleased first game is sparse, but from what I can tell, this seems like another attempt at making that very game, now in 3d and removing the platformer elements to make it a much more sober affair. Which fits the topic much more, though I could have seen a platformer being pulled off the way Life is Beautiful pulled off comedy set in a concentration camp. But that would have required an extraordinary storyteller. Though the title of Bernard's 2013 game would have fit this one much better with how fascinated Samuel, the child in the story, is with his fairytale book, while there really is next to no light in this darkness. Said child also looks almost identical to the player character that was shown for Imagination is the Only Escape.

The game follows a jewish family in France just before and during World War II and German occupation. This is an interesting topic to me - while we learn a lot about the war and how France was quickly conquered, occupied, and cut in half, what we almost never hear about is what exactly "the Vichy government collaborated with the nazis" actually means. Our schools tend to gloss over that in favour of both the Eastern front and Auschwitz. Specifics about a country that, in the grand scheme of things, barely mattered with how it was overrun and removed from the battlefield in a matter of weeks, tend to be dropped when there is so much else to talk about.

So it was very enlightening (aha, there's the light!) to learn more about what the Vichy collaboration with the nazi regime actually looked like. Also, on a side note, the role Henry Ford played in spreading antisemitism is not something we often hear about at all.

As for the story: We witness one family member after the other falling victim in some way to the persecution of Jews. The selection of characters shows well the many ways in which antisemitism was introduced and spread among the people. From laws to the effects of propaganda, and finally the deportations. How one didn't even have to actually be a jew in order to be prosecuted as one, because this was not about the religion, this was racism.

The story does have its shortcomings, though. It relies way too heavily on its music creating the tone of the scenes. Bernard's unique artstyle also hurts the narrative, in my opinion. It's very stylized with huge eyes and overly cartoony expressions. Sad expressions especially look like caricatures. The storytelling is a tad too crude, it feels like an hour of the director pointing at what is shown and going "look how sad this is", which sounds preachy. This, in turn, lessens its impact. A little more light would have made this darkness more poignant and less dull. And I feel like poignancy is important to drive home that the reality behind this was not merely sad - it was horrible.

But it does make for fine teaching material. While imho it does not succeed as a game, it does succeed as an educational tool.

Game: 6/10

Difficulty: 1/10

Time: 1.5 hours

Edited October 1, 2023 by shadaik

shadaik · October 8, 2023

It's PS Plus week! In other words: Time for the backlog to grow a bit! especially with this beign a good month for Plus Essential, so I added all three games, and all have a version for PS4 & PS5 each. With Plus Essential, I tend to add all I neither currently own nor am sure I'll never play (such as most sports games). Farming Simulator 22 is a matter of local patriotism, too, the series hails form my hometown.

At the other end: I picked up and finished Broken Sword 5 on PS Vita. I had played the game in 2018, then it repeatedly crashed and I gave up getting it to work. This week, I finally re-downloaded it and lo and behold, it came with an update and no more crash, allowing me to properly play that game. Looking into the second episode, it turns out that one was free on the Vita store, so I finished the whole "series". It doesn't count for the backlog, though - I had removed the first episode when I started playing it back in 18 and the second game was never on it. Oh well, still one less unfinished game!

I think I'll still mark that down as -1 for Vita, but without changing the main number.

This brings us to +3 on PS4, +3 on PS5 and -1 on Vita. On to the review!

Non-Plat 100% #78 & 79 - 100% # 177 & 178

Broken Sword 5 : The Serpent's Curse (Episode 1&2)

Another British game set in Paris, much like last week. In this case, that fact is plainly obvious by how the French characters are written, especially that insufferable waiter from the café next door from the gallery the game starts in. Apparently he will serve only to "fellow revolutionaries" - oh well, that is kind of typical behaviour for a point'n'click npc, now that I think of it. Especially because he immediately after is seen serving a sleazy biped Triceratops with a tiny human head named Laine, whom he despises. The game has some issues with consistency, but I'll get to that.

The fifth game in the Broken Sword series is, oddly, the only one that made it to PS4 and Vita. Oddly, because the original 1996 Broken Sword was ported to any platform that didn't say "no" quickly enough. The games revolve around an American insurance assessor, George Stobbard, and French journalist Nicole "Nico" Collard. They tend to stumble upon conspiracies involving mythology and religion, which they do once more here.

A theft in a small art gallery turns into a murder in front of George's eyes. A few talks to a slightly unhinged priest later, we learn about the Gnostic worship of Lucifer. It shoud be noted the game's portrayal of Gnosticism has nothing to do with historic reality. What the game posits is much closer to some form of Satanism, believing Yahwe and Lucifer to be opponent gods, the balance between them being imperial for the world not drifting into the extremes both deities represent.

If this sounds a bit like the consistenly inconsistent mythologies of the Indiana Jones series, that is probably because that's exactly what it emulates. Just without much action due to its genre.

For a point'n'click starting in the 90's puzzles are remarkably straight forward, no complete nonsense like some other series. A sudden sonversation with a goat or playing Ave Maria on a set of paint cans and a fire extinguisher nonwithstanding. This makes it beginner friendly and emphasized its story more than usual. This is abit unfortunate, because while not bad, the story clearly needed one more round of polish. The inept but full of himself Navet is a fun character, his mook Moue is a nice side character, but the others are missing a final touch. The game did get a few laughs out of me, but its humor is very dry and will not click with everybody.

The game was originally published as an episodic game, though at a mere two episodes of three hours each, this might have been a mistake. After episode 1 ends with a remarkably non-cliffhanger cliffhanger (because rescue is coming), various threads are dropped immediately. George being a prime suspect in another murder, whatever happened in the apartment next to Nico's, all dropped. The second episodes suffers from plotholes like how the bad guy was able to read without any of the decoding tools George used. Normally, I don't much care about plotholes, but both point'n'click games and crime fiction are among the few genres were these things actually matter because they are all about details adding up into a larger picture. This is what I meant by "issues with consistency".

Still, there are ideas worth reading here. The game's ultimate cosmology is confirmed by the events of the end: The world has two gods, with humanity's existence being guaranteed by the balance between them. Seeing how most Christians and pop culture already depict the devil much closer to an opposing god than to a mere fallen angel as most groups within Christianity officially decree, they might as well adopt this.

Sadly, there are a few technical hiccups to be found. I mentioned the crashs I had previously. The game still crashed a few times, but it was manageable. Art styles of characters and backgrounds can clash at some points. The trophy for "finding all Joey's" is not about several Joye's, but about one Joey seen when revisiting the same scene again a few times - that was kind of misleading and made me replay the first game because I missed a few. Oh, and there is something really weird going on with the character models. Observe:

Yeah, that is not how focus works!

From what I have seen, the PS4 version has mended the technical issues and added a shiny platinum trophy. It's a fine game with some rough edges, but this classic series would have deserved to be represented by some of its superior previous entries.

Game: 6/10

Difficulty: 2/10

Time: 7 hours

shadaik · October 15, 2023

Buckle in, this week is a long one. I decided to counteract the growth of PS+ week with a sorta marathon. So I went through my list and noted down all the fast and easy ones to tackle them in one evening each, basically replacing movie time for a few days.

I also happened upon a few games that had no business on my list. Lego Marvel Super Heroes was on there twice because I had previously secured a few free DLCs on my European account but ultimately ended up buying the game on the US account.

Likewise, Rainbow Moon and Tales of Zestiria showed up despite me not owning them because I added some free DLCs to my library at some point.

I also played Sky: Children of Light on my Switch to figure out if I like the game, and, well, yes, but no. Sky is a pleasantly meditative experience, but I really don’t like all the (literal) hand-holding in the trophy list. I’m a loner when a playing and this is just annoying to me. So I’ll play this game, but I leave it to the Switch were I can ignore all that social stuff and not worry about leaving trophies unearned.

That makes -4 games for PS4 before I even started playing.

On the other hand, there are also three new additions:

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst – Been on the, well, edge with this one. I enjoyed the first game on an alt account on PS3. The online is about to be shut off, but looking into it, the online trophies for this one are easy enough so I’ll risk it in exchange for it being a game I think I’ll likely enjoy. Scheduled for November.

Santas Monster Shootout – This looks awful, but reportedly plays better than it looks. It was at €0.39 on a sale and with a dirge of Christmas-themed games, this one will be played December 25^th. If anything, it seems to be the least bad festive title. And yes, the title is missing an apostrophe, that is not a mistake on my end.

Corridor Z – Endless runners are something I always enjoyed. This on, too, was recently at €0.39 and it got me curious enough to jump in. Probably going to play this on Vita, so I’ll add it to that list.

As for games finished this week, there’s quite a few, though Goosebumps was not on my backlog. Hue was on the Vita backlog, but gets to also be removed from the PS4 one due to a shared trophy list. That makes a further -3 PS4, -1 Vita.

The games are: North, Radio Squid, Sagebrush, Goosebumps, Hue. Let’s go!

Non-Plat 100% #80 - 100% # 179

North

Ah, the “walking simulator”. Terrible genre name, but a great genre. I would say I’ve never played a bad one, but then I remember Spectrewoods exists and I played it, so there certainly is a way to ruin this genre, it just seems to be really hard. Part of that might be mindset; you’re not bound to be disappointed at the lack of action when you know you’re in for a genre that is more about leisurely revealing its world to you.

Mindset is clearly important in playing North. Reviews are split about this title, and I get the distinct feeling the split is less about taste or even actual issues with the game, but about the mindset of those going in. Negative reviews tend to read like they are from people that are very literal-minded when it comes to interpreting media. Some even claimed to have no idea what the game is about.

That is remarkable, because the game is very clear and unsubtle what it’s about. It outright states it before you even start: You are a refugee from “the South”, trying to get accepted into the titular North. Some specifics feel European, though the city looks more American, it’s probably meant to be neither and just showcase the struggles of immigration.

Said struggles are portrayed as situations the player walks into. Working in a mine at a grueling job that leaves many dead, most likely including the player character at his first few attempts. Talking to doctors and the police, getting papers for the immigration office. Ostensibly also sending letters to your family, but I never found out how to do that while playing despite the game insisting in its opening screen it’s very important to do so.

Some describe the game as set on an alien world. However, that is not the case, unless aliens somehow have renaissance sketches and human iconography strewn about their cities. No, the otherworldly look of the immigrants, likely including the unseen player character’s own body, is much more a very literal display of alienation. Isn’t it funny how language has been shifted by cinema enough that the literal and metaphorical meanings of “alienation” have swapped?

But yeah, that is the core of it all: Alienation. The character is thrown into a strange world where nobody speaks their language, the biggest puzzle is understanding what even is asked of them, and where in order to get further one has to pretend to adapt to their strange customs.

The world is sparse and bleak, but that does have the side effect that you will be able to find everything there is to do if you just keep following the lights. It looks like the set of a 1920’s German Expressionism movie and feels a lot like you’re in a story by Franz Kafka (specifically The Trial). If, like me, you are a fan of both, this will be a treat, if a very depressing one.

Visually, the game has a look that immediately makes one think it’s displayed in a modern art gallery. And that might just be where it belongs the most, just because how that context alone would help get the players in the right mindset to “get it”. As far as art goes, this is too unsubtle to be regarded as a masterpiece, but it certainly is easy to recognize as something that belongs in a museum nonetheless. And it definitely has enough people going “I don’t get it” to be counted as “high” art.

Game: 8/10

Platinum: 3/10

Time: 1 hour

Plat #109 - 100% # 180

Radio Squid

Platinum Squid

Get all other trophies.

Alright, let’s shift gears a bit, shall we?

After all that depressiveness, something upbeat is in order. Funny enough, we stay in the previous game’s color scheme of mostly black and white with scarce appearances of mostly red. But this one looks less like a 1920’s German movie and more like an NES game that did not get colorized. Yes, we are in the realm of retro shmups.

In Radio Squid, we play a small cephalopod that doesn’t seem to be a squid and certainly is not a radio. But it has a cute red heart on its… uhm, forehead? Let’s go with forehead!

Our hero has to take care of a curse by getting through an undersea maze, defeating ill-meaning creatures in its path. To do so, it, unsurprisingly, shoots at them. What is surprising is how heavily puzzle elements play into this. The screen wraps around until one screen is cleared, so going out of the left screen will make you appear on the right end of the screen. Same for up and down. Okay, simple enough!

Now, in each stage, we have to collect a music note before we can shoot at our foes. That is likely where the “radio” part of the name comes from. As we do so, our hero starts to shoot bullets in one of four cardinal directions that can be chosen with either the right stick or using the buttons on the right side of the controller as if it was a d-pad (which felt much tighter). However, the bullets can bounce back and hurt little squiddy if we’re not being careful.

Okay, neat idea, thing is it doesn’t really survive the execution phase. While easy because there are infinite respawns so long as we have enough coins, this feature can get extremely annoying. Especially because it’s impossible not to shoot once we started until all enemies are defeated – and because the shooting is bound to the beat of the background music, making the pattern of one’s own bullets extremely unpredictable as it interacts with level geometry to bounce off of.

It’s not easy to make an easy game also extremely frustrating, but if one thing can be said about Radio Squid, it’s that it pulls it off.

Game: 4/10

Platinum: 2/10

Time: 1 hour

Plat #110 - 100% # 181

Sagebrush

Perfect Heaven

Get all the trophies

Right, back to walking simulators, then! Visually, we upgrade from NES to Nintendo 64 with this one. Odd choice, but we’ll just go with it. Not like I choose a game’s art style for it when laying.

I knew very little about Sagebrush before and was actually surprised to be presented with another walking sim so soon. What I knew was that it was about a cult that committed mass suicide in the early 90’s. The cult is fictitious, but is inspired by real-world cults, most obviously Heaven’s Gate.

We play Lilian, the only survivor of said ritual suicide, 20 years after the events. The game begins with her arriving at the cult’s former home, an abandoned farmstead in rural New Mexico. After getting through the fence, we quickly find the first of many keys and a very handy map in the first building. All buildings we need to find are marked clearly on there, including the individual trailers we need. How convenient!

Going back and forth between different buildings and areas, always getting pointed in the direction of the next place to visit very clearly by the keys and notes we find, we unravel to story of the cult from when Lilian first arrived all the way to its end, followed by an insight into what Lilian’s life was like after.

From daily life, we start to see what exactly cult leader Father James is doing and how he builds and abuses his power.

Seems legit.

This game is utterly creepy. The art style is from the worst of the N64/PS1 age, but it helps with the unsettling tone. A more modern look would have detracted from that, this game is absolutely deliberately ugly. Sound is minimal, but there is constant creaking of the old wood buildings are made from and of doors closing behind you. This keeps us constantly on edge, it feels like there is somebody else there, even though we know there never is.

The journey is a bit surreal and mostly a reflection of Lilian on herself. At first it seems things don’t add up – how does a bloodstain in the sand keep for 20 years, let alone still attract flies after so long? Why are there keys everywhere? But as we return to the chapel by the end, one thing becomes clear: We did not see the place the way it literally was. We saw Lilian’s memories, we saw what she needed to get all that happened sorted in her mind.

Much like North, this is a title that asks the player to read it properly and get into it with the right mindset.

Game: 8/10

Platinum: 2/10

Time: 2 hours

Plat #111 - 100% # 182

Goosebumps: The Game

You Can’t Scare Me!

Earn Every Trophy.

Let’s get on the more wholesome end of creepy with good old Goosebumps. I don’t hold much nostalgia for the series, mostly because I had little interest in horror when it ran in the 90’s. I was more of a scifi guy. So this game had to stand on its own for me.

Behold, true horror!

First up, because of the extremely missable nature of the trophies in this, I played entirely following a guide. Otherwise, trophies like “finish the whole game in less than 175 moves” are likely to work against it. Usually, I use the guides as helps not to miss anything, but here I followed on that went through the game button press by button press. So, the odds are severely stacked against Goosebumps.

How did it fare? Eh, could have been worse. But let’s get into it now:

One night, a nocturnal move goes wrong when a sentient ventriloquist puppet escapes from a truck. The truck ends up crashed in the quiet neighborhood of the player character; gender and name to be chosen by the player, there isn’t even a default option, I felt like a guy named Gavin that day.

So, when Gavin comes back from school, not only is the crashed truck in the way, his house has also disappeared and replaced by a shadowy mansion that looks like the Addams family decorated it. Probably an upgrade, really. The dungeon with the living green goo under the kitchen sink is a bit of a drawback, but other than that, it seems alright.

Well, Gavin doesn’t seem to like it and through a couple of puzzles and dialog options, we go up against the evil puppet. The end “battle” is underwhelming, but its solution is kinda funny, even if we have seen this kind of fourth wall break a little too often by now. I will not go into specifics.

On thing I noticed in my subsequent playthroughs to get all the stuff, die ten ways, and so on, is that there are often several ways to do things. Like, you have to make at least one phone call, but you can do it either using your mobile - or a payphone. There is a song to be played, but you can do so using either a hidden walkman, or download the song and load it onto your phone. That the developers have thought of ways players might approach things and implemented them is actually nice.

All in all, it’s fun. The whole thing is just a 90’s point’n’click, but one that feels significantly outdated now. At least it’s not one of those absolutely daunting ones where you have to type in your next action and pray to all the gods you know the game knows the verb you just used. Still, the whole thing feels very dated. This is one for those who enjoy this specific kind of point’n’click adventure that is largely limited to the 90’s. And those who hold nostalgia for either Goosebumps or Choose Your Own Adventure books - frankly, more the latter than the former.

I just can’t tick any of those boxes, so for me, the game is merely fine. Not bad, not good.

Game: 5/10

Platinum: 2/10

Time: 3 hours

Non-Plat 100% #81 - 100% # 183

Hue

Time to switch to the Vita for the last few collectibles on a game I mostly did last week. And to a genre I surprisingly did not feature here yet: Metroidvania. Well, kinda. Usually, metroidvanias give the player new tools do access new areas. In Hue, we instead gain the ability to wash everything in a new color, making objects of that color disappear to be able to pass through and objects of different colors appear to be able to interact with them.

There is a story here, but this is not a story-based game at all. The story is mostly an excuse to continue the puzzles. It does end on a sweet note, but also gets awkwardly jumbled in the developer’s apparent need to inject pseudo-philosophical monologue in between sections. At least it stopped just short of the good old “Ancient Greeks could not see blue because they did not have a word for it” nonsense. In contrast to some of the other games this week, don’t think too hard about the events or it all will stop making any semblance of sense.

This game is about the color-based puzzles. They are well-made if a bit easy for most of the game with only the last section offering much in the way of challenge. Meanwhile, the collectibles offer less of a challenge than a nuisance, many of them are hidden behind entirely opaque walls that one has to randomly walk through on a whim - or a guide. But that is a minor point.

Hue provides an interesting contrast to Radio Squid in that it, too, employs a simple but quirky mechanic in a 2d indie game, but it ends up being a relaxing experience rather than an annoyance. In some ways, it’s the very definition of a successful indie game and reminded me a lot of Fez or Limbo in general feel.

Game: 8/10

Platinum: 3/10

Time: 6 hours

shadaik · October 22, 2023

From this week on, I'll add a new point to the "score" in view of the debate in and my thoughts on this thread: List quality refers to how good or bad the trophy list is. A good trophy list is one that enhances enjoyment of the game, a bad one is one that hinders it. "Plat" will be renamed to "difficulty".

Alright, started a few games, finished one on PS4.

Meanwhile, I started a little "project" in the shape of tackling a whole series, that being the PS3/Vita incarnations of Invizimals. We'll see how this goes by next week. As for now:

Plat #112 - 100% # 184

Adam's Venture: Origins

Hero of the Day

You've saved the world from a religious war.

This one has been lingering in my backlog for quite some time, one of the first PS4 games I bought that was not from Plus.

So, how is it? Oh boy! Let's get through this one by one.

Adam Venture, sadly of no connection to the Venture Bros. family, is the son of an archeology (I think, never clarified, might be theology) professor. Said professor enjoys being so cryptic, Adam essentially lives in an adventure game. Yeah, they kinda acknowledge how bizarre some of the puzzles are and why they are there at all. It's how they attempt to be funny. Attempt.

After some shenanigans we find ourselves in a dungeon below the family estate, a development that becomes possible by Adam's impressive ability to survive absolutely jaw-dropping falls. I guess being so light in skull content that body part doubles as a ballon helps. Anyway, said dungeon leads him and his father's new assistant Evelyn to a town deep in the Pyrenees mountains between Spain and France where they meet another professor in search of the location of the garden of Eden. And a decent coffee. This is a rural area in the 1920's, coffee is an understandable priority.

Odd thing is: I just saw this. Broken Sword 5 also heavily featured the search for the location of Eden. And French coffee culture. Both games are also episodic adventure games that later got released in one game on PS4 set in countries they are not developed in (this one is from the Netherlands, Broken Sword was British). Huh.

With Broken Sword 5, that lead to entire plotlines disappearing in between episodes to never be seen again or even contradict new ones. And guess what, this one does that, too. Essentially there are three episodes. The game lists 19, but the actual release of the original game this is a remake of was split in three. Btw, this is a 2016 PS4 remake of a 2014 PS3 remake of a 2009 pc game. It's not a sequel or prequel to either Adam's Venture or Adam's Venture: Chronicles, just in case anybody thinks of doing "the complete series", all three games are iterations of the same game with some changes that ostensibly are improvements.

The first third revolves around the search for Eden, the second around the Temple of Solomon, and the last one is a finale around the temple mount in Jerusalem. The orignal titles of the release outright said as much, so I don't consider these spoilers. Connective tissue is kinda there, but quickly devolves into just doing whatever in any part. While it is refreshing to see Adam and Eve (hah!) make major discoveries like finding Eden and the treasure of King Solomon only to discover the main villain is just involved incidentally and has completely different plans involving the temple mount, it also makes no sense. He initially directly competes in finding Eden only to ultimately present a plan where finding Eden is not only completely irrelevant to him, he actively shuns the treasure of Solomon due to being disinterested even before finding out what it is. Anybody knowing enough about the bible to solve some of the more explicitly biblical puzzles will not be surprised to find out what Solomon considered his treasure, but that is the one clever story beat here.

The core of the game are the puzzles, which tend to be easy enough even I can beat all of them without looking at a guide. Except for one puzzle involving shining a light at a door, I had to brute-force that one. And there is a very annoying maze near the end. Btw, the game tells me the caves in the first third are specifically designed to keep humanity from returning to Eden. I would honestly expect them to do a far better job at this, as I doubt God is that simple-minded of a puzzle designer. The greatest challenge here was being able to read roman numerals, while most of it is a walking simulator while accompanied by The Snake. Oh well, it's not like anything else here makes sense. In fairness, reading roman numerals was probably quite the challenge for people that lived before the Roman Empire.

How bad is it? Well, let me describe what kind of a puzzle game this is. Imagine a game presents you with a situation where you have to use a car to escape, but said car is out of gas. It's also standing inside a shack filled to the roof with fuel barrels, some of which clearly saying "Diesel" on them. Now, how do you fuel the car? Why, by going outside and searching the heavily patrolled hangar halls also full of fuel barrels for three specifically interactable objects that look nothing like fuel canisters, of course! Silly question! That's the kind of brain activity we're dealing with.

The final fight (well, "fight") hinges on people putting up signs when a track ends at the edge of a canyon. You know, instead of not putting rails to the edge of a canyon or at least remove them. Everybody in this world is just irritatingly dumb. That would possibly be a spoiler were that not what the plat screenshot is showing, anyway.

The trophy list is mostly straightforward - all trophies except two are unmissable story beats. The trophy for doing nothing for the first few seconds of the game is a little bit funny.

Game: 4/10

List: 6/10

Difficulty: 3/10

Time: 4 hours

Edited October 22, 2023 by shadaik

shadaik · October 29, 2023

Weird one incoming. But before that, additions, some for each numbered system:

PS3: A few weeks ago, I really liked Tekken 7. I decided to go and seek out the previous installments of the franchise. It helped that all games except one I already did still have not only achievable platinums, but also a still-alive online mode. Most of them are also dirt cheap. With that, two new entries from Fighting Editions: Tekken 6 and Tekken Tag Tournament 2 join the backlog.

PS4: Earlier, Sky left the PS4 list in favour of going onto another system. This week, the opposite happened: Switch'n'Shoot is coming over from itch.io due to a very deep discount on PS4.

PS5: This list gets two new additions that aren't new at all. I just didn't realize before that the Shantae games come free for all owners of the PS4 versions. That adds the first two PS4 games to my PS5list.

Plat #113 - 100% # 185

Invizimals: The Lost Kingdom

Saviour of the Lost Kingdom

Obtain All trophies

PS3

This week is light on images due to the PS3 not having a screenshot functionality. I will try to compensate.

So, Invizimals! Invizimals was supposed to be Sony's answer to Pokémon, starting on PSP. I enjoyed the PSP games because they embraced a rare sort of deliberate cheese. Think Pokémon, but with the cutscenes from Command and Conquer with a light dash of Monster Rancher. It also has fun using a camera attachment to incorporate the real world. Fun stuff, all in all.

This summer, I got surprised by the fact I had the first Vita game of the series unplayed in a drawer. I think I got it for about €12 in a clearance sale. Well, it turned up and I said to me: "Imma do this proper and get the whole set!" Plus, I had the hope the PS3 game would unlock stuff in the Vita game. That was a big thing with the series, especially heavily promoted with the first Vita game: The card game, tv show, etc. would have codes that could be scanned in by the Vita game to get creatures for the collection.

Good news: While this game does not have such codes, fiishing the story gives the ability to connect this game to the Vita game Invizimals: The Alliance and transfer creatures and (some) in-game currencies between both games. So, I did that to everything I had gotten on PS3 immediately once I was done.

The Lost Kingdom is playinf parallel to The Alliance. They start with the same cutscene but diverge. The Lost Kingdom follows our hero, Hiro (of course!) into the Invizimal world to become sort of an ambassador of Earth. Why send a child through? Who knows. Realistically, for the original target demographic. Anyway, something goes wrong: There is no welcome party or even welcome committe, the world is mostly empty of creatures and seems broken into chunks, the latter issue increasing across the game. There are new metal creatures running havoc. Just being a human Hiro has no chance getting through this so he retreats. Okay, no, he gets given the powers of the first Invizimal he sees and goes on an adventure, followed by the radio voices of a female assistant and professor Nakamura, who talk entirely too much and keep explaining everything.

On his journey, he will meet more creatures and gain their powers and forms, 12 all-in-all. Although the developers had no idea what to do with half of them story-wise, so we get 6 that have proper introductions and fights, and 6 morethat are just kinda standing around in alcoves to be found and give Hiro their power and form.

Oh yeah, story: Evil magnate dude wants to exploit the Invizimal world for ressources, yaddayadda. It's really not worth talking about, standard kids rpg stuff. Though I'm finding the prevalance of anticapitalist base stories in Sony games of all places increasingly funny. All in all, your standard kids game. I can see they tried to branch out the handheld franchise into consoles, but had no idea, how to incorporate anything that made it stand out.

The experience was marred by my PS3 being set to German. Comparing this with what I've seen of the Vita counterpart, the dub removes any and all acting from the voicelines. Definitely a reminder to just set my PS3 to English like the other systems. Not that the original is good, but it is far more bearable and the jokes tend to land better with actual delivery. Don't get me wrong, the English voice acting is not good, just... less bad.

Though the professor's voice actor had a funny way of saying Zaphyra, making her sound like "Za Führer" and that was just gold. I don't remember that guy being a slender cat lady with a very feminine outline, but if he was and the history books are lying to me, that would explain his appeal to the voters back in the day. I should ask some old people if Hitler was a catgirl.

Trophy list is solid. Lvels, story beats, collectibles, a few additional tasks. Nothing too bad or grindy, though I do advise swimming in circles anytime you get into a body of water to help the trophy for swimming 10 km along. One palythrough was 7:45 hours with some cleanup for missed collectibles after that.

Btw, the game does not even mention there is a chapter select (literally on the select button while in a level). So, fyi, there's a chapter select.

Game: 5/10

List: 7/10

Difficulty: 2/10

Time: 12 hours

Plat #114 - 100% # 186

The Voices Stories

Graduate

You are reading at a 100th grade level

PS4

Let me start this by saying one thing: I'm not attacking the game on any front when I say this shouldn't have a platinum, because it's not substantial enough - that is just a fact. Nor when I say it shouldn't even have trophies, because it's not a game, it's an app, like Netflix or the web browser. Not even, when I say this shouldn't be on a console. On Vita, maybe, there is a small tradition of ebooks turning up on handhelds every now and then. But not on console. Reading this ebook on a tv screen is just unpleasant on the eyes. I am puzzled why this is not on Kindle instead. Eh, probably because nobody would buy it.

Still, €0.13 for a short story collection warrants a read and so I ignored the staining trophy (not like I ever cared about a curated list) and went in actually reading this. Because that something I had seen nobody talk about: How are the stories?

There's five here, each a piece of flash fiction presented in white letters on black ground. That is immediately more pleasant than any actual game The Voices has published. Straining the eyes and physically unpleasant, that is still an upgrade from Ayleouna or Lady in a Leotard with a Gun. Oh, dear lord, I have to finish Ayleouna one of these days... Well, maybe Matthew Green he's a better storyteller than he is a game developer. So, the stories:

Solar Youthamatic: An alien buys a device that stops their sun from going nova and installs it. The punchline can be seen from several lightyears away and it's completely forgettable. But the story is coherent and has a point. Not all in this collection can say that.

Game Builder: A game developer develops (as they do) an AI that can create any game the user asks it to make. Then there is accusations of enslaving a sentient being and the whole thing goes to court. This kinda works as a commentary on how nonsensical much of the current debate about AI is and how little people understand what is actually going on. The lady going "Don't think I don't know what is going on, I know basic HTML!" is just perfect. Problem is, the story suffers from not knowing where it's going and events bend over backward to fit the plot. Still, I can see this one actually turning up in a real, curated flash fiction collection.

Literary Burnout: A former proofreader who got so burnt out from his job, he forgot how to read, tells his story. This one is just nonsense and seems to have no point. Plus, there is a prevalent issue of Matthew Green when it comes to scale. This is something that happened in every story so far, Green is the embodiment of TV Tropes' page Sci-Fi Writers have no Sense of Scale to the point I'm wondering if I'm just missing some sort of joke. In here, there is just nothing warranting me ignoring it anymore.

Dead Trial: A ghost comes into a police station to report he's just been murdered. This one has no inflated numbers, but a deep lack of understanding how trials work, especially who concludes admission of evidence and when. Which is really important in what is essentially a court procedural. Cute idea I have seen done better dozens of times. Given the author is a game developer, the premise could have made for a nice visual novel, given about a year or so of polish and some alternate endings.

The Folly of the King's Reader: If I dig deep enough, I can see what Green was going for here. It's just that the writing on this one is inept enough, I think this was written at some point in elementary school as an assignment for an English class and now found in a drawer. I was literally going to look up if Matthew Green is a native speaker of English when I realized his name is Matthew Green, so, probably. This one is just a mess and should never have been publicly shown to anyone. It has a funny punchline, maybe writing something completely new with the original idea might have salavged it Alas, it did not. Oh yeah, Edinburgh is trillions of miles from London, in case you didn't know. Trillions!

Even reading this porperly, this was below 30 minutes. I have literally taken more time writing this review. The stories come up to lower average at their peak. But I have seen enough bad flash fiction to not have my literary senses offended by it. It was worth a try. Which is way more than I can say about this company's actual games.

No screenshots because this is an ebook, screenshots are just nonsense at this point.

App: 2/10

List: 5/10

Difficulty: 1/10

Time: 27 minutes

Plans for next week:

Let's up the game quality, shall we? A lot, I hope.

shadaik · November 5, 2023

That preview was a little off. I had forgotten that this week not only included Halloween, but was also one of my busier weeks this year with most of Friday and Saturday at a conference. Whoops.

Oh well, I started Mirror's Edge Catalyst anyway, the goal witht hat right now is to get the two online trophies before the servers shut down a month from now. Then I'll switch to Dante's Inferno which also has its servers go down in amonth. From then on, it's a hopefully pleasant trip to their Plats and 100%s.

Instead, I did a Halloween game and completed the serie sit belongs to. Which is a couple of really cheap plats difficulty-wise, but also a free one, so why not?

Aside from that, Evolve leaves the list. It's an online game that got shut down this summer. I stumbled across that fact this week. Too bad, looked interesting. But such is the destiny of online-only games.

All that makes for one less PS4 entry. The four other games were not previously on the backlog, do don't get subtracted.

Plat #115-118 - 100% # 187-190

Halloween Puzzle (x2) & Puzzle Journey (2x)

Happy Halloween - You Are a Fox

Unlock all trophies.

PS4

I had previously shelved Puzzle Journey, not realizing the game could be paused to stop the timer for the time limit trophies. I only found out, when its "sequel" Halloween Puzzle came out. They are all free, each has two region stacks, so let's just put them in, starting with the North American stack of Halloween Puzzle on well, halloween.

These are not puzzle games at all, these are just Memory. However, the name Memory for games is trademarked and so we end up with this instead. Fair enough.

You know how Memory works: Bunch of cards lying face down, with one pair for each image on the cards. Flip cards with the same image to remove them, play until all cards are uncovered.Depending on difficulty, this game has between eight and 64 cards in a game. In Puzzle Journey, you need to finish in a certain time and with a certain number of moves to get the associeted trophies, in Halloween Puzzle, these limits are now part of the game itself. The Pause button changed from O to Options and the themes are different, with some spoopy images instead of animals (and a random anchor).

It's simple, it's easy, the Expert level is best played with a pen and a piece of grid paper to note down where which card is. Pause the game to take notes, otherwise taking notes eats up too much time. That way, even expert mode needs just one try. The other levels are easy enough without any tools.

Barebones, really easy, and a very simple thing game-wise. But it's free, so why not fill some otherwise boring 20 minutes with it? That said, I would not have paid for this had it not been free.

Game: 3/10

List: 6/10

Difficulty: 2/10

Time: about 20 minutes each

Plans for next week:

Okay, let's get a short one in while I work on some bigger ones.

Edited November 5, 2023 by shadaik

shadaik · November 12, 2023

We have another departure due to time: DoA6 is apparently too dead to go for the plat. Especially because I don't expect to get around to that one anytime soon.

On the list of games I actually finally played, there were two short ones I had been wanting to finally play for quite soem time. So, here's the weirdest Doctor Who console game and a day in the life of a fox.

Plat #119 - 100% # 191

Doctor Who: The Lonely Assassins

Clever Clogs!

Not only have you helped Osgood to defeat the Weeping Angels, you’ve managed to successfully unlock every trophy the game has to offer!

PS4

Dear lord, that's a platinum description if I've ever seen one! You can feed a village for a week with that thing! Sadly, its image belongs to a rather bland set of identical trophies in different colors. But that's a minor gripe. Instead, let's go back in time. Fittingly.

S3E10 of the 2005 reboot of Doctor Who ranks among the best storiesin the show's 60 year history and with good reason. The story about a race of sentient statues that attackyou when you are not looking at them and send you back in time (it's more complicated, but that's the gist) balances suspense and fun with a unique monster and clever writing. So I'm very happy with this game being a direct sequel to that episode, further integrating the Weeping Angels into the ongoing universe, involving later characters like Osgood in their story. Osgood is a scientist working for an organization tasked with protecting the world from aliens, just so we're on the same page.

While the Weeping Angels have appeared again in Who, I have seen their futher appearances as a constant downgrade, pilingnew abilities on tothem until they were so overpowered it made no sense anymore anything could ever resist them. Some of those are on full display here, so just don't think too hard about how they can spread through pictures of themselves and yet have not managed to tae over absolutely everything. I mean, if there's one thing that is photographed en masse every day and can't meow, it's gotta be angel statues. But we're gonna ignore that now.

It all begins when the player picks up a phone. It's locked, of course, but suddenly a new OS starts remotely installing itself and we are contacted by Osgood, explaining that the owner of the phone has disappeared. Said owner is Lawrence Nightingale, one of the two protagonists of the aforementioned tv show episode. The other one, Sally Sparrow, has been written out because her actress really didn't want to be in this. Not even in a still photo for her chat messages, so she is instead played by Cousin Itt of Addams Family fame. Either that or she wanted too much money, Carey Mulligan has come quite far since her breakthrough role in Doctor Who. Either way, she left for the US and gets replaced by a new character named Natasha. Fair enough. There's also a dickhead neighbor who somehow does not believe Lawrence's warnings of killer statues. As if that was somehow improbable!

Going through the files on Lawrence's phone, we slowly unravel what happened to various people who disappeared. For anybody familiar enough with Doctor Who to have bought this due to its connection, the answer is a bit clearer than it should be, making it kinda forced how much the game tries to build tension who the mysterious adversary might be (hint: their the least well hidden thing in the game's title image). But their new abilities to become a threat even through a phone work well to build on the threat they usually pose.

The whole thing takes place inside of a phone. At a few points, an outside camera is employed, but that is still accessed through the mysterious phone. There's few hiccups in how phones work, but overall, that is well done.

Which is it, "Lawrence" or an unknown number?

The core gameplay is a chat realized through multiple-choice dialog, which is nicely done. I do remember playing one game like this before (Emily is Away, I think?), but there's really not that many. Of course, that works best on an actual phone. Which brings me to the main weakness here.

The game suffers a bit from being ported to a home console. As seen above, the game plays on a phone screen displayed on a tv screen. This manages to completely kill its jumpscares (it has a few of those), because the constantly visible borders are an everpresent reminder this is not a real phone conversation. On an actual phone it would also be easier to compensate the complete lack of a soundtrack. Aside from a few calls and video files on the phone, all you'll hear is the sound of text messages popping up. Not the most thrilling experience on console. There is some disconnect between the inherent impatience of the average phone user and the media consumption typical for them and the slow pace this narrative is moving at.

At its best, though, it does get the heart rate up. There's a minigame appearing twice that involves deleting corrupted files. Failing it does not fail the game, but does lock the player out of the best endings. In general, there's not really a way to lose, at most a wrong response is going to cost you a few minutes of your time.

The story is fine and mostly lives off of nostalgia. Fans of the series wil find it chock full of references, connections, and characters. While longer than the original episode, the story works well as epilogue for it, its length a concession to its medium. However, unbless you want the trophies, this feelslike it's a far better experience played on the phone. This is not a bad PS4 game, it's just that it's better on a phone, because it's just made for that machine from the ground up. If only the Vita was still viable...

Game: 7/10

List: 7/10

Difficulty: 2/10

Time: 2.5 hours

Pla screenshot manages to be a massive spoiler even by my lenient standards

Spoiler

Plat #120 - 100% # 192

Endling: Extinction is Forever

Endling

Unlock every other trophy in the game.

PS4

I should have done this one first, would have made for a good transition from last week's plat called "You Are a Fox". Oh well...

Instead, we're keeping to titles that manage to spoil their big thing in their own title screen. In case you don't know what an endling is, they even threw in a subtitle: "Extinction is Forever". Subtle. But I do have a thing for games that have you play as an actual animal, so I'll ignore this.

You play a vixen fleeing a devastating forest fire destroying what used to be a nature reserve. As things settle, our fox lady gives birth to four adorable cubs and now it's off to collect food, keep the cubs safe and saving them from peril. Meanwhile, the forest starts to disappear, trash piles and construction sites take its place, poachers roam the area and shoot at everything that moves - though there are also friendly humans that will give the foxes some fruit. The games plays in a set of nights, each with a time limit for exploration and gathering, adding urgency.

The fox is remarkably intelligent, but that is a necessity of being a game protagonist who needs to have some level of agency and thoughts in what they are doing. They actively form friendships with other animals, understand their emotional states and... I'll let a loading screen tooltip explain:

Sure...

As time goes on, the environment deteriorates, no matter how many well-intentioned people also appear. Until eventually - well, I won't tell, but there is some sort of catastrophe going on behind it all, one just outside the world we can see through the eyes of a woodland creature, no matter how smart. And it all eventually ends with one senseless act in a devastated land.

Game: 8/10

List: 7/10

Difficulty: 2/10

Time: 2 hours

The plat screenshot is way less spoiler-y thanks to me missing a missable trophy so I got this in a repeat playthrough.

Plans for next week:

Going through all the stuff on my PS3's hard drive, I really should finish this series already.

Edited November 12, 2023 by shadaik

shadaik · November 20, 2023

I really need to get to all those PS3 titles that have multiplayer trohies. Dante's Inferno is in the works right now, but I did come too late for Darkstalkers Resurrection. The latter was apparently shut down with next to no warning and it's a shame, really, I did want to do that one. I'll possibly still play it at some point, fully aware the plat is unobtainable. Maybe on an alt. It does leave the backlog that way, though.

Meanwhile, I did manage to get the online trophies in Mirror's Edge Catalyst, but because Dante's Inferno is also shutting down December 8th, I'm putting that on hold.

On PS4, a few new games enter the backlog:

- Hades' Star is a new free-2-play that looks unlike anything I have ever seen outside of browser games. It's reportedly very good but recently came under flag for deleting tons of stuff in a major overhaul, offending its playerbase massively.

- The Innsmouth Case looks extremely interesting and unconventional. Count me in!

- Sturmfront: The Mutant War is one I had my eyes on for some time. It was on sale recently so I finally caved. This one also comes with a PS5 copy.

- And finally, my morbid fascination with knock-offs got to me again and so I got Cube Life, one of the oddest knock-offs on PS4.

- On PS5, f2p game Honkai Star Rail joins the list. If this is as good as the developer's other f2p, Genshin Impact, I won't regret it.

This makes +2 PS5, +4 PS4, -1 PS3.

And now for the kinda 3 games I finished this week:

Non-Plat 100% #82-84 - 100% # 193-195

Sam and Max: The Devil's Playhouse (Episodes 3-5)

Telltale Games has a long and confusing history. They have always been about episodic games featuring someone else's IPs, but it took them quite some time to figure things out. Their early episodic games had some technical weaknesses in that each episode was a game of its own with a separate trophy list. It wasn't until Back to the Future they figured this stuff out (for the physical release) and it exploded in popularity with The Walking Dead.

But right now, we are way before that would happen. What this means in terms of gameplay is that events and collected items in one episode don't carry over to the next. That does limit the story's interaction with its own parts. The Devil's Playhouse remedies this by relying heavily on cliffhangers and foreshadowing. As per usual with Telltale Games games, the series has five episodes of roughly two hours each, but I already finished the first two several years ago, which is why only three appear here.

Sam&Max is mostly a parody of hard-boiled detective stories, with this series in particular taking inspiration from supernatural anthology series like The Twilight Zone or b-movies. We get a narrator introducing and ending each episode, cheesy over-the-top titles and demons and aliens galore. Pleasantly, it does not require knowledge of the old LucasArts games of the characters, except for the last episode that is heavy with old characters and a storage rooms full of memorabilia. However, the world is wacky enough for this to not really stand out, though it does create a strong feeling the series used to be even wackier before.

One thign of note is that each episode features adifferent gimmick, again except for the last one. This is thanks to the main mcguffins here, a set of toys that grant supernatural abilities rangign form telepaths all the way to mimicry. We have transplanted brains, clones, a kaiju, eldritch deities, secret labs... everything you could want reading those titles. All this is peppered with background gags, witty dialogand outlandish events.

The humour is mostly goofy but manages to avoid having too many contemporary references, instead going mostly for evergreens. Just light-hearted and fun stuff all around. What references there are relates to topics that have been established for far longer than current pop culture, aside from one or two jabs at then-current pop stars

There is no playhouse, though, just a toybox. Which is clearly not a house, unless you're a cockroach. But ultimately, all complaints are nitpicks, this ranks high in Telltale's ultimately vast catalog. Except for one gripe: Telltale once again show they are capable of creating a completely unique story. But because of marketability, they chose to have everything being a license of some existing franchise, dooming the company to fail. But this is 2010, and the fall of TTG is still far away.

Game: 8/10

List: 7/10

Difficulty: 2/10

Time: 10 hours (all five)

Plans for next week:

While I don't expect to finish Dante's Inferno in one week because of how tough the online trophies are said to be, I do have a small spin-off of Assassin's Creed IV that I'm planning to do so I don't risk getting bored

Super_Mep · November 26, 2023

@shadaik

I can't believe you got suckered into playing Adam's Venture as well. If only I could go back and time and punch myself in the face before I bought it and played it 😅. Such a horrible game. It was on a wicked sale but still the game haunts me haha.

shadaik · November 27, 2023

11 hours ago, Super_Mep said:

@shadaik

I can't believe you got suckered into playing Adam's Venture as well. If only I could go back and time and punch myself in the face before I bought it and played it 😅. Such a horrible game. It was on a wicked sale but still the game haunts me haha.

Yeah, looking at my backlog, I don't think there is anything else coming up that is this much of a waste of time.

The only two I expect to possibly get close are Carnivores and Rotating Octopus Character, maybe Godzilla. But they are way down the list, so Adam's Venture and I can rest easy knowing I won't cover anything worse than it for the foreseeable future.

shadaik · December 3, 2023

Surely I didn't skip a week, spacetime merely warped around me!

The backlog is growing again, it tends to do that in December. The new additons are:

- Arrog - just looks generally interestingenough to grab it at 49 Cents

- Reus - this one is basically just coming over. Leaving my Steam wishlist, entering my PS4 library. I had my eyes nthat one for quite some time.

- Aliens: Fireteam Elite - with the next batch coming to Plus Essential this week, I still had to get the point reward for playing one of the current games in the Stars program. Hearing Mafia II is a terrible port and not caring for asymmetrical multiplayer, I opted for this one. Probably won't be playing too soon, though.

That makes +3 on PS4 and +1 on PS5 thanks to cross-buy on Aliens. While I also did start three games from the backlog in that time, I did not finish any of them. Which is really annoying in one case. Which brings us to...

Plat #121 - 100% # 196

More Dark

Platinum Demon

Get all other trophies.

PS4

So, Dante's Inferno decided to be an ass about its collectibles. I had missed two coins and some relics in my first playthrough. That did not bother me two much, all of those being in the very short first few levels. Until I found out that the game's version of New Game+ does carry over abilities and relics - but not the coins. And with that, I'm looking at another week before that platinum pops. Teaches me not to use a collectible guide...

Wanting to add another shiny new platinum this week instead of skipping another, I looked toward my library, seeking something else infernal to do in one evening. As it happens, I got a third game alongside Reus and Arrog that fit in so well, it meant the game barely even touched the backlog before being recruited for this mission. So, let's talk More Dark.

According to the store listing, this game has a story. The "Lord of the Other World" is on vacation and his daughter Evilina is in charge, quickly loosing control and having convicts escape all over. Does this story matter? Well, no. Evilina appears in a few screens and there is an intro featuring her clearly voiced by a man not even trying at femininity. Maybe he thought the "I am totally a 16-bit sound file, y'all!" filter would mask that, maybe it's supposed to be jarring. But I do love how the store listing avoids calling the Underworld just that, while mentioning Hell by name twice.

And then there's the workers rights issue. I mean, the imp you actually play runs around butt naked while Evilina gets to have all the clothes? I demand justice! No clothes for Evilina! Because I care about workers' rights!

That aside, this game is borderline deceptive. LIke I said, Evilina is barely existing in the game, popping up for the menu, a voiced start screen, and a Breakout clone bonus level. More to the point concerning almost-deception, the latter is heavily featured in the games' promo images, but barely shows up in the actual game.

Expectations

Yeah, this is not what this game is. I think it's only in here so the promo images look borderline interesting by having some variety in them. That variety is not true to the actual product. Because all other levels are single-screen puzzle platformers where you have to kill one or two prisoners by jumping on them or using crates and then reach a door. You play one of the imps that serve Evilina and they can barely jump by platformer standards, so the crates or the bounce from jumping onto an enemy have to be employed to reach higher ground, while later levels give you the ability to create a slime to use as a launcher. It gradually increases in difficulty, though a lot of the difficulty is by giving you deliberately useless options that result in having to restart the level.

I know this has a lot of positive reviews, especially on Steam, but I can't figure out why it has them. They did work in convincing me this is worthwhile, but really, it's not. The game is a mostly dull affair that does next to nothing with its fun premise and lands squarely on the bottom of the many hell-themed games I played. Even Agony, while far from a good game, at least was imaginative about its setting.

Ratalaika has a good selection of good games despite how easy they can be, but this one is a dud held aloft by several levels of marketing managing to make it look way better than it actually is.

God, even the platinum trophy looks dull as, well, hell

Game: 3/10

List: 5/10

Difficulty: 2/10

Time: 30 minutes

Plans for next week:

Like I said, this one threw me a curveball last week, but that is just a minor setback. The game is fun and short enough, making me confident it will be done this time next week.

shadaik · December 10, 2023

It's PS Plus Essential week and with all three games being of interest to me, those enter the backlog. Lego 2K Drive won't have to wait on there for long, but for now, it is on there.

Counting the stacks, that makes +2 on PS4 and +3 on PS5.

And with that short intro, we're off to this week's finished game and its long-coming review:

Plat #122

Dante's Inferno

Master of the Inferno

Unlock all other trophies

PS3

Beware, this one has major story spoilers. Abandon all hope of not being spoiled, ye who read on.

This one decided to annoy me a bit. Collectibles in a game without level select are a sin, punished in a part of hell this game suspiciously left out.

Adaptations from literature are still a rare breed in gaming, the odd Witcher aside. Usually, you only get them once there is a movie out to mediate the arts. The situation is slowly alleviating, with titles like recently The Invincible or Metamorphosis coming out. But an adaptation of a Medieval poem, no matter how famous, deeply entrenched in its contemporary culture and politics? A poem that can only be properly understood with very specific knowledge about 14th century Italy? Now that is odd.

EA (you might have heard of them) wanted in on the craze of clones of God of War and what they came up with, was a very, very liberal adaptation of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, with only the first part ever making it to stores. In the book, Dante is a wanderer barely kept from being lost in the depths of Hell by the guidance of dead Roman poet Virgil who explains the layout of the place to then relay that info to the reader. In the game, Dante is a former crusader thrown into hell in pursuit of his dead wife who starts out by killing the Grim Reaper. Beatrice is in the book, but the two versions of her might as well be separate characters.

Dante (in the game) does not wander Hell, he conquers it, slaying demons left and right, absolving many more high-profile damned and laying waste to the place. He starts with killing the Grim Reaper, to then continue with every layer of sorting Hell has. The rulers of the circles of Hell fall before him, something that is sure to ruin the order of the afterlife forever. Or so it would seem, because there is something very much off about the idea of somebody just getting into hell and wrecking it. That should not be possible by any means. Neither should Hell feel like a bona fide power fantasy. I was questioning the design of this game more and more, nothing added up.

Spoiler

And then it hit me: When entering the Circle of Greed, Dante asks Satan, where all the Muslims he and his men killed are. The Devil answers that this is not their hell, it "yours". Reading that as a singular "you", the whole thing suddenly made sense. This is not merely Hell, not the Inferno. This is, quite literally, Dante's Inferno! His own personal afterlife designed to give him a chance of redemption. In this, the game's idea of Hell defies the Medieval ideas Dante (the author) knew, as a place of eternal torment, and relates it to the more modern conception of a forgiving God who would never allow anybody to suffer such.

It was at that moment I knew Dante had imagined everything after the moment he faced and supposedly killed the embodiment of Death itself. He had never returned home and found his family dead, this was all part of his personal hell. And because that idea of hell sees it as a tool of redemption, he gains the ability to judge those he meets as a test of his morality. This story is a story even to him, handing him a chance to show he is worthy of redemption.

This makes sense, if you look back at the book. You see, despite still being commonly misunderstood (imho) as a work of theological theory, what the Divine Comedy, especially Inferno, actually is, is the Medieval equivalent of a diss track. Dante (author) had Dante (book protagonist) witness the afterlife of any person that was significant to Dante (author), essentially phantasizing about the torment awaiting those he hated. The theology is just some world building used to ground the actual story, which was mostly bile and spite as shaped by the alphabet.

Modern readers would be utterly lost in all that, only getting the superficial masquerade of theology and taking it at surface value. Thus, a faithful adaptation would be a waste of time for a major company that wants to create somethign that makes them money. However, taking the personal aspects of the book and making them even more personal to Dante (game protagonist), presenting him with a version of Hell that is catered to his sins and failures in life, is not only a story that modern readers could understand, it's also very much in keeping with the personal nature of the original poem, translated into the storytelling conventions of a world 700 years later. It is thus a, dare I say, clever way of adapting something this foreign to us.

Game is still way too easy, though. I did not die a single time by the hands of enemies. Not even by those of Satan himself. The platforming however did provide countless drops into bottomless chasms. That said, the depiction of Hell itself is imaginative and appropriate, looking very much like those visions of it and other nightmares painted by Hieronymus Bosch about 150 years after this book.

The 100% is impossible now thanks to the servers for its one multiplayer DLC having been shut down, but for that I only have myself to blame, there was plenty of time to go for them in the six months since that was announced.

Alas, let it be known I liked this one quite a bit. And that Satan has a schlong that hangs down all the way to his knees. Beatrice must be quite sore by the time she leaves his allure. Too bad its implied sequel, naturally an adaptation of Dante's Purgatory, never made it into the world. No, this would not have become one of the great outstanding series everybody talks about. But it might have become a solid niche title living in its own little corner of gaming culture.

EA thought they'd get something big. Other than Satan's sausage roll, that is. They made an expensive-looking animated movie and everything. They even refused to compromise their artistic vision to make Hell as repulsive as it should be. Once you have witnessed a gigantic Cleopatra birth a batch of demonic infants from her actively lactating breast, you know they went all-in on their theme. But this was killed by commitment, because such commitment demanded commercial success to be repeated, and commercial success it did not get.

Game: 7/10

List: 7/10

Difficulty: 3/10

Time: about 20 hours

Plans for next week:

A bit over a week from now, a new batch of games is leaving PS Plus Extra, as titles in a subscription service are wont to do.

Of those, there are two I decided to go for before they leave and I think finishing them this next week is easy enough. Incidentally, the color red seems to have a foothold in this thread now.

Also, I shall make up for the lack of a 100% completion by going for the one DLC trophy I never got in Skyrim.

shadaik · December 17, 2023

Oh, hey, I finished one of the games I said I would! I think I'm getting the hang of this by now.

But before that additions. I got three things I had been looking for for a while.

Let's start with one game I could have gotten at any point but only bit now on another sale. Kawaii Deathu Desu looks like a nice little casual thing to do when bored. It looks fun and that's it.

A bit harder to find is another title I've been interested in for quite a while but that got delisted. Alas, I found a code reseller having this game for cheap and after a mere two attempts, the code worked and I got me République. A unique dystopian tale where the player is not the protagonist but someone anonymous helping the protagonist. Intriguing!

And then there is my curiousity involving obscure peripherals. I already have the complete set of Wonderbook games ready to go, but my eyes fell onto another mostly forgotten peripheral. Yes, I know one of these games has an unobtainable plat and I'm currently going back and forth whether to play it anyway. I still have some time to figure that out because the hardware unfortunately was missing the usb dongle to connect it and I can't even figure out if that had never been included or just fell out of the box it was sent in. The condition of the terrible packaging used to send it to me leaves both options open. Anyway, it's the uDraw with a complete set of PS3 games published for it. I count these as one entry in my backlog list because I will do them as one block once I can.

So, that's +2 PS4 and +1 PS3 with nothing leaving because the game I did finish this week was neve ron my backlog to begin with. Please welcome...

Plat #123 - 100% #197

Foreclosed

Closed File

You left no unfinished business

PS4

A lot has been going on and so there was no space to start El Hijo before it was too late to finish it while it was still in Plus. So it was probably a wise decision to start the shorter game of the two Plus-Extra-leaving titles that interested me first, as that one had an actual chance of being finished.

I have a soft spot for games looking like comic books with panels, speech bubbles, all that jazz. While this is something that harkens back all the way to the Genesis with Comix Zone, they still are a rare breed for games that try to be a little more artistic-looking. On a scale at how well they implement it, Foreclosed does not get very far, though. It just adds nothing to the game. I assume that was done more to make rendering easier than for any other reason, though the comic panels can be convenient in showing multiple angles of a scene and there is one instance at the very beginning that implements it really well, as we see the main character under surveillance by several cameras, each taking one panel. That observation thing is never brought up again, though. I guess it's a good thing I got République this week to follow up on that idea.

Your reminder that cyberpunk was born in the 80's, so a Gameboy is technically incredible future technology

Those minor gripes aside, Foreclosed is a solid and just about challenging little cyberpunk shooter. Nothing all unusual, just a third-person shooter in a cyberpunk setting with weapons upgrades and abilities such as telekinesis. Not all of these make sense in the setting (such as the aforementioned telekinesis), but they're fun, so shush.

You play oddly-named hero Evan Kapnos who one morning finds out to company effectively owning him went bancrupt and he is expected to show up to be auctioned off by the city's main court. Already, a unique world shows itself. Usually, the state has all but disappearted in cyberpunk to be replaced by giant corporations or freelance forces to govern anything. Here, the government has instead followed suit and started operating like a megacorp itself. A state of affairs that makes far too much sense to be comfortable.

Comforting to know that by 2084, nothing changed at the IRS

Corporate conspiracy is afoot and Evan soon finds himself the only surviving employee of Securtech. And there's a couple of guards and agents trying to end that "last survivor" status, and not in a good way. We do have help, though. The former boss of Securtech picks up Evan to have him investigate what happened, which also helps him avoid being auctioned off. Or killed.

There is not that much to talk about, though. A fact I desperately try to mask by inserting lots of pictures into this. Overall, it's a short but solid shooter featuring a character whose voice is so gravelly it borders on parody. The writing doesn't quite find its tone, but it's an interesting variation of the usual cyberpunk fare. I think it's gunning for a sequel, but I doubt it'll get one. All in all, the very definition of an average experience. Not bad, not good.

But it is pretty

Game: 5/10

List: 5/10

Difficulty: 3/10

Time: 4 hours

Plans for next week:

Skyrim is giving me a final grind before I can reach level 78 and fight a legendary dragon, but it's close. Also close to finally giving me its platinum is Rocket League.

And finally, I'm eager to play République.

shadaik · December 24, 2023

It's Christmas time! Well, n Germany it is, we start celebrating on Christmas Eve. And that means two things: More games and some seasonal titles!

As for the first, the backlog is growing one final time this year, adding:
Islanders - Strategy games are a rare breed on console yet they are what transitioned me from playing every now and then to calling it a full-on hobby. So a little strategy game on console and on a sale is always welcome!

Sea of Solitude - I've had my eyes on this one for a while, looks intriguing. As might have become apparent by now, I like games that have something to say.

Fast Striker - PS4 and Vita. My tendency to buy a bunch of shmups I will probably not finish in a long while remains unbroken. Add me to the unending pile of "I like shmups, I'm just not good at them"

Lego The Incredibles - Lego games are always a good time and this one is getting surprisingly hard to find on disc. Now I only need to watch Incredibles 2 before I play this

Tribal Pass - One of my more esoteric goals is to have played all prehistoric-themed games I can get my hands on. THis is one of those! I'll probably make a themed block out of that next year

The Sinking City - Oooh, lovecraftian horror done seemingly well!

That makes for another 6 additions on PS4, 1 on PS Vita. I detract two games finished on PS4.

But I will also counte rthat this coming week. See, I decided to do a lightning round to end the year with a digital firework. I compiled all the short and easy games I have and endeavour to play two of these a day until January 1st. That is -20 games across PS4 and Vita and includes multiple stacks for titles I own on both systems (My Big Sister, Access Denied, and Metropolis Lux Obscura).

This will give plat 125 to Burly Men at Sea instead of the original plan of Rocket League, but I'm willing to sacrifice a nicer plat for outpacing my buying habits.

And this starts with the two titles I specifically selected to play on the day of Christmas Eve, before the festivities begin, comencing with...

Plat #124 - 100% #198

Santa's Monster Shootout

Victory

All trophies completed

PS4

When several of your most iconic roles are immortals of some kind, you are unlikely to have a peaceful rest. This is something Christopher Lee has to learn this Christmas in the gaming world, having been resurrected in a full-on Santa costume and with no further word on who he is in the game, but, I mean, look at him, that's just Christopher Lee in a Santa costume!

Exhibit A

True to his musical flair (yes, he did music, too!), we get A Heavy Metal Christmas with everything this entices: Snow, Pine trees, whimsical backgrounds, all manner of firearms (well, six of them) and monsters to kill in the spirit of the winter solstice.

Unfortunately, Lee is also known for taking on a lot of roles in cheap and forgettable productions, saving his reputation by sheer volume. And sadly, Santa's Monster Shootout is one such case. Despite being very much in line with his work for Hammer Productions, this lacks their charm. While charm was certainly aimed for, it was missed, which is quite hard in a 2d sidescroller without jumping or any movement beyond left and right - so, really, it's more of a 1d sidescroller. The only time an additional dimension is employed is when parallax scrolling results in trees obscuring incoming monsters, which is, as everybody knows, Santa's one weakness.

Tap the X button until you either reach the end of the level or run out of ammo and have to return. Do that for about two hours and you're done. It's about as dull as it sounds, but the platinum has all the relieving qualities of a Christmas miracle.

A miracle, it's over!

Game: 3/10

List: 4/10

Difficulty: 1/10

Time: 2 hours

Non-Plat 100% #85 - 100% # 199

Big Dipper

PS4

Speaking of dull... Okay, that might be a bit harsh, so let's start at the beginning, shall we?

Visual Novels have a bad rep among gamers, especially on console. They're known to be hilariously easy, have next to no gameplay and take mere minutes if you don't read them. Often, I disagree, and this needs to be said even more so for this one, which goes one step further and presents itself as a Kinetic Novel. That is, a Visual NOvel with no choices to make, just vsit back and read one line at a time.

I view this as an entirely different thing to games that just happens to also be digital and to benefit from being able to combine text, images and music into one narrative. They are no more inferior to games than a novel is inferior to comic books just because it has no pictures. That is not how appreaciating any kind of art works.

Big Dipper takes its medium serious in that we only ever get dialog or the inner thoughts of the protagonist for text. No narrator here, no descriptions of situations, just spoken lines and thoughts. Well, written lines, there is no voice-acting here.

Set in what I assume to be, from context clues, a town near Murmansk, Russia, it tells the story of a young recluse who one New Year's Eve (yeah, turns out this is not set on Christmas at all, unless that it just celebrated on another day in Russia) meets a young woman in his own house, exhibiting a whole lot of Russian hospitality.

Pictured here.

Turns out she used to live in this house and was unaware it got sold off by her grandfather years ago. And from here on we get a very standard cute little love story in ashelter from the storm, peppered with some supernatural entities and ideas of Slavic mythology. Those elements try (in vain) to add some tension to the story. It's all cutesy and nice and cozy and sappy and schmaltzy and, to come full circle, dull.

I could imagine days when I'd like to read something like this, a warm beverage on the table (something sweet, probably cocoa), a fire lit, the night outside silent. The kind of story you'd read to welcome sleep. I can see appreciating this under the right circumstances, at the right time.

Yet, there are some annyoing details that threaten to crash the party even so. Typos are almost as common as when I type a long review in English, likely even for the same reason - my computer is set to another language, so when I type in English, absolutely everything has red squiggly lines under it due to being foreign to my spellcheck, making actually spotting typos a nightmare. Add to that a few minor errors that would have been caught by an editor, such as meat thawing while outside at -30 °C, and you get just enough of this to be noticeable. Though I would like to know what raindeer are...

The girl, Julia, also seems to be about 8 ft. tall thanks to some bizarre scaling oversights in the UI

Look, I'm being really nice here, but in the end the one thing that stands out to me is that this was really dull. The kind of dull you often see in attempts at wholesome holiday stories. Some might find comfort in that. I didn't.

Game: 3/10

List: 4/10

Difficulty: 1/10

Time: 1.5 hours

Up next

The lightning round continues and for those days, to keep the posts readable, I'll post every two days, giving us the first set on Tuesday:

As always, schedule is preliminary and may change

shadaik · December 26, 2023

And here we are, two days and three games later. Almost on schedule, the second stack for My Big Sister will have to wait a bit, but the other two titles planned for tomorrow are each under an hour, so that'll work out fine.

Additionally, Ice Cream Surfer is switching from PS4 over to Vita because whenever there is a shared trophy list, I prefer the portability of Sony's underrated little handheld system.

That makes for -2 PS4 games (Arrog, Ice Cream Surfer) and -1 Vita games (Burly Men at Sea, My Big Sister, but adding Ice Cream Surfer).

Right, on to the finished games, then!

And, spoilers: The quality dramatically increases this time around compared to Christmas' Eve.

Plat #125 - 100% #200

Arrog

Live Fully

PS4

Oh look, a double milestone! 125 platinums and 200 completed games! This spot was intended for Burly Men at Sea, but I decided to play the shorter Arrog first and that worked out nicely. Because, I'll say that right now, Arrog is a good game to go there, even if its platinum is extremely common and the game ridiculously easy.

Every now and then, a tiny title will appear on the PSN store that is best described as the gaming equivalent of flash fiction. Short, extremely easy, focused on showing you something rather than asking you to be good at playing. Imagine something like What Remains of Edith Finch, but only 20 minutes long and in 2d. And without any dialog as well as mostly in black and white. And with a lot of capybaras.

Arrog makes little pretense of what it is about, even if it used not a single word at any point, aside from "Now Loading". It's a somewhat mystical representation of the circle of life with a heavy focus on death, letting go and closing the circle. There is a reason the capybaras are here, though they will make sense only in the very last moment. Even the trophy list is in on the theme, making the idea of the circle as obvious as they could by mentioning it in the last trophy anybody will get, one for starting the game again, literally called Full Circle.

While fairly short, this is a beautiful tiny experience in the same vein as titles like Proteus or Detuned, maybe Thomas was Alone.

Game: 7/10

List: 8/10

Difficulty: 1/10

Time: 20 minutes

Plat #126 - 100% #201

Burly Men at Sea

Ye've Done It

“This day, you reach the end of a story,” she continues, “and the last of its paths.”

Vita

And we stay on the topic of cycles and circles with maybe the smallest game ever given as a PS Plus title way back in the early days of the PS4. This time, it's about changes ove rthe course of different iterations of the same story. A total of twelve possible stories may occur and the game invites the player to find all of them. At the end of each, a weird sea serpent spirit thing turns up, congratulates the player on having made some new choices and announces there are more to be found, until all are found. We then return to the little harbor we began our your each time.

We play as the three titular burly men, rotund figures overshadowed only by their enormous beards. These are the brothers Brave Beard, Hasty Beard, and Steady Beard. As they set out to sea, a giant whales swallows them, but not to worry, the whale is basically a friendly living bus system. The three ways to exit it make up the main branches of the adventure, each with two more choices to make. And each is being chronicles until the bookshelf of the old man who started all this is filled with all twelve tales.

Thankfully, this is not nearly as repetitive as it sounds. Not only is each iteration short enough not to bore the player, the game also reacts to repeat parts of the path by skipping or shortening large parts of the interaction. This helps against any fatigue and makes the whole experience smooth. In addition, the colorful and rounded artstyle gives this thing a lot of charm befitting the tall tales of a bunch of seaman that look downright jolly with their large beards and adventurous attitude.

Now, whan I don't call this a good game, I don't want to misunderstood. I'm not calling it a good game for the same reasons I won't call a Mars bar a good meal. It's sweet and sugary and fills a short urge, but in the end, there is not much nutrition here. The point of the story, saying there is plenty of adventure out there and we decide how ours goes, is so obvious to put into a simple game, it's basically a description of gaming as a medium. It's the most nothing a game can say. But it is endearing and, unlike the Mars bar, it won't rot your teeth.

If I hadn't gotten it through PS Plus, I would complain a bit about the price, though. Still, there are worse ways to spend two hours then being delighted by such a bundle of charm.

Game: 7/10

List: 5/10

Difficulty: 1/10

Time: 2 hours

Plat #127 - 100% #202

My Big Sister

Platinum Sister

Get all other trophies.

Vita

On to Boxing Day, and following a circle and a cycle, we have a loop. I swear, I didn't plan this.

This one is one of those retro titles that are becoming more and more common alongside the tools to create them. But that prevalence does lead to more and more voices chiming in with new stories to tell and experiences to live. One genre that has especially benefitted from the influx of indie developers is horror.

Here, we have a showcase of both. My Big Sister is something that could have existed on the NES with no changes. It's a classic top-down game with pixel graphics, but sports some weird imagery and ideas. To say too much about the story poses a heavy risk of spoilers, but suffice it to say the story twists like a windmill in a hurricane. The story involves two sisters, Luzia and Sombria, who get kidnapped and brought before an evil witch that lives by incorporating features of her victims into herself. Or so it seems...

This is a story wherein everything told might be a lie by some character or other, even including most of the endings. The somewhat cute characters help the game get away with some heavy topics of depression, loss and self-harm. Likewise, the pixelated look of the game manages to get away with buckets of blood splashed everywhere and one brief moment of nudity (by an adult character in a bath, just to be clear).

I wish the game had done a bit more with the concept of the loop. It's alluded to all the time but its nature as a loop isn't all that important in the long run, it feels almost abandoned in gameplay while the dialog is littered with the word. I think the developers were unsure about how the loop is actually a loop. That's slightly disappointing. On the other hand, if you like character studies, there's plenty to analyse in our main and this is helped by the two sisters forming the heart of the story being really well done as characters.

Is it as scary as it wants to be? No, I don't think NES style graphics are capable of that. But it is a nice story with engaging characters and some really disturbing ideas peppered in. There's one particularly disturbing ending trophy to do.

Game: 7/10

List: 6/10

Difficulty: 2/10

Time: 3 hours

Up next

The lightning round continues with some short games to declutter the backlog, the next two days bring:

Schedule is subject to change.

shadaik · January 3

Right, maybe that whole "lightning round" thing was a bit too ambitious. Some RL stuff didn't help. Welp, new year, new phase. Let's go into what I did finish from the ligtning round despite a personally messy transition of years. I even got some new motivation to clear out games: My PS4 no longer has the disk space to let me install the current version of Genshin Impact!

That said, some games are changing position again: Both Ice Cream Surfer and Letter Quest leave the PS4 list and go into the PS Vita list because I realized they've both got cross-platform lists and are cross-buy with Vita. As per usual, when I can play a game on Vita, I will.

No new games added this week, so let's get into the ones done, and we have what is left of the lightning round:

Plat #128 - 100% #203

Arrog

Complete the game

Get all trophies

PS4

In Mid-December, there was a short sale on the PSN store that amounted to alot of simple games being sold for €0.09 each (I think it was also $0.09 in the US). Enticing, but I did somewhat control myself and decided to look into these games to select those I actually had interest in. While it is hard for any game not to be worth 9 Cents, I eventually narrowed it down to three titles that looked like they might actually be fun: Light Dark, Learn Katakana (more on that one next) and S Lanes.(which is actually challenging, thus it'll have to wait).

Most of these games seem to be deliberate throwbacks to the Atari era of gaming, roughly the mid-to-late 80's. They lean heavily into that and, unless many nostalgia trigger games, that includes gameplay. Though the gameplay is much smoother than what was possible back then, the game concepts and how they work is largely authentic to that era.

On one hand, seeing something like Light Dark on a modern system is jarring. Giant pixels form rudimentary shapes, barely recognizable as representing a human or spaceship, hurrying across landscapes unapologetically alien to reality in order to fulfil objectives that serve no purpose but to be there. Whatever button you use for imput results in the same single available action being carried out.

For LIght Dark, this means a little person runs tirelessly to the right collecting coins and avoiding spikes. The world is split into a lower dark and an upper light half, the figureswitchign between both to accomplish their mission, inevitably given a short jolt from the switch, but also able to jump a longer way when the button is kept pressed for longer, avoiding longer patches of spikes.

This is simple even for an endless runner. But you know what: It is also quite entertaining. This is, in the end, gaming at its purest. Yeah, I'm sure it'll get old real fast, but it also demands next to no time being put into it and so it ends way before that can happen.

I do wish all these games were put into small collection. That would make the trophy list more worthy of providing a platinum. Still, I cannot claim this is not worth 9 Cents. Is it worth the normal price of 99 Cents? Honestly, that is much harder a sell. I feel like that collection of the roughly 40 such games on the store at maybe 3.99 would be the sweet spot for this. As a standalone, I like it, but there is just too little to it.

Game: 4/10

List: 6/10

Difficulty: 1/10

Time: 5 minutes

Plat #61 & 129 - 100% #122 & #204

Learn Hiragana/Learn Katakana

You have learned them all

You have learned them all

PS4

Oh boy, these two.

Anybody who knows about the Japanese writing systems, skip this paragraph. So, Japanese has a couple of writing systems that are used in tandem. You will sometimes find the Latin alphabet named Romaji, usually to write names and brands of Euro/American origin. Then you will find Kanji, a writing system akin and related to the Chinese one with each symbol representing one whole word, often multiple depending on context. And then there are the two Kana systems, in which each symbol represents one of the 46 syllables in Japanese, used to write out the spelling of words (usually Katakana) or some single-syllable words used for grammar (Hiragana). To explain it in the roughest but easiest way I can.

Now, learning a new alphabet, especially one that is not actually alphabetical but syllabic, is not an easy task. Trust me, I learned quite a few of them. A common aid in doing so are these quizzes, usually done with cards in which one symbol would need to be matched to its closest equivalent in an alphabet the learner already knows. In this case, the respective Kana to their Romaji transliteration. In that way, this is a useful tool and it's nice having the bonus of it coming with a trophy list. And that is all to say about it, really. It heps that these two were also included in the recent 9 Cent sale.

I do include the Hiragana one because it's essentially the same game, I just did that already a year ago.

But I do want to talk about something else: I have seen people comment that Japanese people would ridicule people using this, and my question is: "Why?" How else do you think people who learn Japanese as their second language learn your alphabet? I know these are mostly used for kids, but don't you understand that learning a new language issimilar to being a child learnign to write? Everybody needs to start somewhere and this is a good place to start. Sure, they need to quickly transition to actually using the symbols to write and then go on and get into essential Kanji. But learning the Kana and doing so using the Romaji they already know is a sensible way to do this and, frankly, ridiculing people for putting in effort trying to learn a new language, is both misguided and extremely rude.

That said, the games can be platinumed by just hitting the same button again and again until all symbols randomly popped with the answer on the right button after about 5 minutes or so. This still is a tool for learning and when used as such in earnest, it's a useful one. The trophy lists would have been great if they rewarded players for streaks of right answers instead of giving one for every symbol. Because using trophies as motivation to gain actual real-world knowledge is a great idea these games completely miss. They're also tools that can easily be found for free on the internet but that's beside the point, isn't it?

Game: 4/10

List: 3/10

Difficulty: 1/10

Time: 5 minutes

Plat #130 & 131 - 100% #205 & #206

Access Denied

Platinum Hacker

Get all the trophies

PS4 & PS Vita

Would you look at that, a game that doesn't use its logo for its platinum trophy. No idea how that one got in here.

Access Denied sets you up in some kind of tinker lab, presenting you a series of boxes with puzzles on them to solve. These start out easy but get progressively harder. The main challenge soon turns out to be finding out what the game actually expects you to do and there are levels where even I myself barely understood how I solved them. Like a good math problem, it will also start throwing completely irrelevant pieces in the mix for you to figure out what parts are even relevant to the solution.

Of all the relaxation games I have played, this might be the first that actually worked for me. Though I do think the "soundtrack" did the heaviest lifting here. It's the ambient sound of rain outside, occassionally interrupted by the sounds of buttons being clicked and machinery moving to reveal the next puzzle box. There's nothing else in terms of sound and that works perfectly to avoid stressing the player. Where in other games, solving such a problem while being pushed forward by the soundtrack would create anxiety, this one invites to just sit down and ponder what to do without pressure. It felt kind of like solving a sudoku or a crossword puzzle on a long train ride. Just a pleasant little time filler.

I would have loved this to be quite a bit longer, 100 levels would have been great. But for any game, that is a good complaint to have.

Game: 6/10

List: 5/10

Difficulty: 2/10

Time: 1 hour

Up next

Huh, my backlog is growing a backlog. Let's do something about that...

shadaik · January 8

Let's start this weke with another entry into the list of "what was that even doing here?" due to another game with just one stack showing up in two of my lists: Downwell leaves PS4 because it's also on Vita and has only one cross-platform trophy list.

Other than that, two new games come in:

Dinobreak - I've had my eyes on this one. On the one hand, it's a dinosaur game. On the other, it looks quite bad. On the third mutant freak hand, I think it's supposed to be bad in a deliberate throwback to the PS1 era. I decided there's enough interest there to wait for a sale. That happened now, and not unsurprisingly because this game was dead on arrival in terms of sales. Won't be on the backlog for long.But I think I'll be fine only eve rplaying the PS4 version.

Xenon Valkyrie + - Game looks really good, was down to 99 cents, in the list it goes! PS4 & PS5.

So, that's -3 for PS4 and +1 for PS5. Two games finished on PS4 makes that -1 on PS4. On to the games finished:

Plat #132 - 100% #207

My Big Sister

Platinum Sister

Get all other trophies.

PS4

Second stack on this cross-buy title after I did the Vita version earlier. No re-assessment after a mere two weeks, of course.

Previous review here

Plat #133 - 100% #208

Jisei: The First Case

Platinum Detective

Get all other trophies.

PS4

Let me in on a dark secret of mine: I like re-releases. I'm always thinking "I can buy a new print of any play by Shakespeare in any bookshop, often even visit it staged, so why should being able to play old games on current systems be a bad thing?" Admittedly, most games aren't Shakespeare, but then again, neither are most books. Did I go into this tangent because I had not better introduction for Jisei? Maybe.

Jisei is the start of a short series of Visual Novels from 2010. It's sequel, Kansei, is also on PS4 (and PS5) while Yousei has not yet shown up. I will avoid spoilers for the sequels,but be advised that the sequels add quite a lot of depth to this first installment. As does the epilogue accessible from the main menu of this part, that I'll suggest reading after the platinum even if it's not required reading.

After a short prologue by the unnamed main character (the name will be revealed in the sequel) about what experiencing death is like, he wakes up disoriented in a café. Barely avoiding an amnesia cliché,somebody then dies. This is how we get introduced to the character's special power: He can feel any nearby death and he also has the ability to experience a dead body's last living experience if he touches it. Of course, being the first one to find a corpse and immediately touching it is not exactly a good look when a witness walks in, so guess what happens? Yeah, that.

And now we're in a murder mystery. The constellation of suspects is well-balanced and makes for a good mystery: An obvious red herring who is nevertheless hiding something, a panicked woman with the worst alibi in the room, and a suspiciously unsuspicious ditzy barista. And then there is you, and an oddly trusting off-duty police officer who leaves the detecting to you. Oh, and then there is also a voice in your head and the absent manager of the café.

(Neil Patrick Harris in Doctor Who meme goes here)

Some of these characters manage to throw off even savvy players enough that at least I directed my own suspicion at a completely wrong target, even though the actual culprit was my second guess and my prime suspect ended up sadly not even being a dialogue option. Which is the one fault I can point at here: There's quite a bit of unexplored potential routes this could go involving at least two outside suspects, the main character's background and questions like why the officer is so trusting of the MC. Some of these get answered in the sequels, of course, but you don't know that from this game because while it does end on a sequel bait scene, the connection between this and the other titles is something you wouldn't know without googling it. Bit unfortunate, that.

The VN is really short and can easily be finished in just over an hour without skipping any dialogue. I do wish I would have learned a bit more about most of the cast, but the MC sadly seems not to be someone for thorough questionnaires. Usually a point of criticism, but it's also priced appropriately, so no complaints there.

Game: 6/10

List: 5/10

Difficulty: 1/10

Time: 1.5 hours

Up next

Omno is leaving Plus Extra, Horror Tales is being done on the side, and somebody messaged me about the multiplayer trophies in Minecraft on PS Vita, which I think is an excellent idea. So, there's my schedule! Simple as that.

shadaik · January 14

New week, new entries.

Leaving the list are three games I happened across when checking my backlog for games that I didn't even have and that got listed in my download library due to having secured some DLC at some point. That's not to say they can't come back, but for now, they're gone because I don't actually have them. These games are: Gravity Rush 2, Lego Star Wars - The Force Awakens, and Syberia 3.

Also leaving due to clean-up is Battleborn, an online game that has been shut down ever since 2021.

After that start of removing a whopping four games by doing nothing, a few additions come in, namely the Plus Essential games. A good month will all three games tickling my fancy, adding two titles on PS4 (Nobody Saves the World and Evil West) and three on PS5 (those two plus A Plague Tale: Requiem). I also added a f2p to the PS5 list in the shape of Epic Roller Coasters.

This brings us to -2 games on PS4 and +4 on PS5.

Neither of the two games platinumed this week were on the backlog, so no changes here. Speaking of which, let's talk about two little indie games this week, Omno and Minecraft.

Plat #134 - 100% #209

Omno

The Enlightened

Master the light

PS4

Gaming sometimes has something close to a love affair with a specific sort of mysticism. Ideas of transcendence come up, of a light we all strive toward throughout our lives.Ideas that seem close to the buddhist idea of nirvana, of life's ultimate goal lying in leaving the world behind. Journey comes to mind immediately, but many others follow, if usually more subtly. But what if you have a game that superficially seems to be just another clone of Journey only to find it's a rejection of its ideas? That's when you get Omno.

The first surprise hit me when I saw my state's media project grant giver pop up in the start screen. Immediately looking into the background, this was interesting already. Developed by one guy, Jonas Manke, with only the help of a composer (who did great work on the soundtrack). Much like needed when competing with the likes of Journey, this game is both acustically and visually gorgeous.

Be convinced!

You play a little guy with an onion for a head traversing a primordial world of alien creatures and biomes. A lot of the animals seem dinosaurian in nature, but there's also floating jellyfish, giant turtles, odd plant-animal hybrid creatures such as what seem to be flamingos with flowers for heads, a whole array of creatures big and small wandering increasingly strange (and fragmentary) landscapes. You start out walking, but soon you will glide on your staff as if it's a skateboard, float through the winds and on updrafts, even teleport vast distances betweenguiding lights. Along the way, you come across not only those weird lifeforms, but messages left by previous wanderers on what seems to be the pilgrimage of those who bear staffs like we do. And, of course, puzzles that need solution in order to progress to the final goal, the light. We collect pieces of light, we pilgrimage toward the light.

So far, so Journey. But where does the rejection come into play?

That comes with reading the messages (and seeing the ending including the image the credits linger over). Early on, they narrate the story of the staff bearers and help give an idea on what we're doing and why. But as we continue, the unknown writers of these logs of previous journeys become increasingly doubtful. With the world as beautiful as it is - what are we even expecting to find that is worth leaving it behind? When there is so much left to see, why desperately fleeing the opportunity to behold it? When the journey is so full of wonder everytime we stop, why press on?

There's some points toi critique here. The whole thing is very short (4 hours to see everything without ever needing a guide). We have a companion the game is so bad at establishing as such it took until the last few levels for me to realize this is not some wild creature trying to evade us, it's supposed to be a floating alien puppy dog friend - a missing connection which hinders the ending from having its maximum impact. Despite the creature even having a cuddle prompt when it gets close enough. And the trophy list has the final trophy pop just before the important parts of the ending, incentivizing shutting the game off at the worst possible moment.

Looking past all that, this is still worth experiencing. "Great" is a bit much. But absolutely worth your time.

Endings are all about timing and this one is just unfortunate

Game: 7/10

List: 4/10

Difficulty: 2/10

Time: 4 hours

Plat #135

Minecraft: Playstation Vita Edition

Awarded all trophies

All trophies have been awarded.

Vita

Well, this has been just over six years in the making. And it's not even my longest platinum journey, that would be Infamous 2 at almost 10 years. But a far more arduous one. But now, the first Minecraft I played on console also became the last one I platted. Unless there's some future version in the works, but it seems like Mohjang is content to have us play the previous generation's versions on PS5 and Xbox Series S/X. Which is fine, I guess it makes deveopment of further updates easier to just bet on emulated backward compatibility.

I don't think I have to explain the single best selling game of all time on a gaming website, so let's go a bit into this journey and the specifics of the Vita edition.

On Playstation Vita, Minecraft was maybe more ambitious than anywhere else, except maybe the 3DS edition. While Sony's little handheld was impressively powerful and I still hold it as the best handheld system ever made (I had every major handheld since the original GameBoy, all the way down to the Nokia N-Gage, so I can kinda tell how they compare), Minecraft is a very taxing game, especially in the 2010's. This had consequences. Not only is the world limited in size, it's also limited in content. The number of creatures spawning is limited, the viewing distance is limited with objects constantly popping into existence in the middle of our field of view, the Nether dimension is downright tiny, stuff like that. Oh, and this edition stopped updating halfway through the Update Aquatic. It's a special litte case, this one. And I admit, I really didn't like it at first.

When I first picked this up, I didn't like it. I quickly lost interest in its empty world. It took a few years of cultural osmosis on this game to build up hype for me and as we saw more and more player creations, it finally hit me why this game was so well-loved. So I picked the game back up, entered my same old world, even transferred it into the PS3 edition. What a world it was: My base an artifial mountain cave next to a tiny plains biome in the front and a dark oak forest in the back, my next-door neighbors the husk of a burnt-down Woodland Mansion that had the misfortune of spawning right next to a pool of lava, dooming it on spawn. The only village ha done house with a librarian in it, everything else I had to build myself and populate it with cured zombie vilagers.I decided to build a zoo inbetween my mountain and the mansion, resulting in a giant canal going right over the mountaintop where I planned to transport squid into the zoo. A whole valley deforested to be turned into an aquarium. It all was delightfully bizarre.

That world would later make it to PS3 thanks to cross-save and finally to PS4 where it would ultimately suffer from old worlds no longer giving trophies as Minecraft PS4 edition transitioned to Bedrock. But it's still there, unplayed in the depths of the machine. And still played on PS3. Not on Vita, though.

You see, recently my Vita memory stick corrupted, killing several saves. I was even in the process of building a new world into a trophy world when it happened. That original of my old Minecraft world was among those. But I decided then and there to now go and finally finish the trophies in the game. Get the plat, get as close as 100% as I could. And so I did. On PS4, then on PS3. And now on Vita. Kinda backwards. The Vita has a special trophy list when it comes to Minecraft ports. Unlike the others, it has several of the later updates included in its platinum requirements. This makes it also the only Minecraft edition with a multiplayer trophy required for the plat. I really thought that was a lost cause due to the age of the game, thinking, surely, the online must be dead by now. I know the servers are still up, but surely nobody plays anymore?

Turns out it wasn't dead. Last week, I was contacted by a guy who was looking to boost those trophies. Preparing my world for that, I unlocked a few trophies without even going for them (Return to Sender and The Haggler) and after the boostign session gave me all trophies that we managed to do with two people, there were only two left for the plat. The online is alive enough I constantly had to kick players randomly dropping into the boosting session. Overkill turned out surprisingly easy in the tutorial world because there's a weapon that does the required damage to any mob while in the water or in rain, an enchanted trident with Impaling V (well, the trident and a book with that enchantment, but that just means to put those together and then attack someting in the water). That left the oft-dreaded Sniper Duel.

Sniper Duel is the one base game trophy that suffers the worst from the system's limitations. Killing a skeleton with a bow from at least 50 blocks away means to shoot at it from a distance where it's just barely still visible. This also means the arrows have a high chance of missing because in the most annoying bit of realism ever, arrows don't always fly straight in this game, which becomes really noticeable when shooting from further away. But I had a plan: Build a trap consisting of a walled-off water stream that pushes a trapped skeleton into a small chamber for me to shoot at from 50 blocks away. Then bait a skeleton to get close enough to fall into the water stream, run back to my marked shooting spot 50 blocks away and have at it.

Turns out that worked like a charm. A creeper almost blew up the base while I lured the skelton in, but just missed it with not a single block of distance to spare. A spider joined in on the fun of attacking me from behind while the skeleton pelted me with arrows. Not to mention I straight-up walked backwards into a cactus. But finally, it went into the water, trapped behind a wall I could jump onto but it couldn't and soon, it was in the killing chamber. And so, after six years, the final mainline Minecraft platinum popped.

Now, onto all three 100%s (the fourth, a second list for the continuing PS4 edition dlcs, I already have)!

Game: 8/10

List: 7/10

Difficulty: 3/10

Time: yes

Up next

Horror Tales is still open as I did not end up playing it this week. Shiro has been intriguing me whenever I browsed past it in my list, and then there is a case of loving to hate some PS1 style jank in the shape of Dinobreak. Morbid curiosity sometimes does that.

shadaik · January 21

Opening, as ever, with the unseen changes in the backlog, we got two games leaving for the simple reason I don't want to play them.

Journey I played on PS3 and got annyoed with its social features. Just not my cup of tea.

Q.U.B.E. is a different story. I just heard so much bad stuff about the Playstation port (especially on PS3!) that I decided not to bother.

On the other hand, Interaction Isn't Explicit joins the PS5 list because it's free and odd. My favorite features.

I finished Tacoma, which was not on the backlog, but got in because it's leaving Plus Extra; and Shiro, which was. Off to looking at those:

Plat #136 - 100% #210

Tacoma

Perfectionist

Left no stone unturned during your time on Tacoma Station.

PS4

This one came with high praise up to comparisons with Return of the Obra Dinn. And it turns out to be a walking simulator, a genre I have yet to see a bad example of. This one is in space!

It's 2088 and we approach Lunar Transit Station Tacoma, it's crew missing and its AI damaged. We take the role of Amy, sent by the company owning the station to secure the AI and any data on what happened onboard the vessel. To do so, we get an AR system that can display recorded moments using colored humanoid shades to represent people recorded earlier in their actual environment. As the AI is being downloaded, we gather these recordings and find out what happened, but also a lot more about the world this is set in.

The game shapes its world using the mundanity of the present to the characters. We go through people's belongings and files and witness the recordings of their talks and actions while constantly getting bits and pieces of what to these people are everyday things and items. News articles about orbital habitat development. A commemorative photo of a moonbase. Leaflets and pamphlets lying around, applications and their answers showing how jobs work in this future apparently controlled by companies founded by the super-rich but still subject to the powers of the market.

There are some odd hiccups here and there. One AI claims to have been split off from the original sentient AI "a hundred years ago" - which would make AIs something from the 80's. We also get to see everybody's ID and one character apparently hails from the "USSREU". This makes no sense whatsoever. And I don't mean politically, I mean the name makes no sense. To start with, both instances of the letter U in this acronym would stand for "union".

Ah yes, the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics European Union. Of course!

One neat trick is that in any recording, we can follow different characters and their interactions, giving us a complex overview of the world, but also relations between characters within a small number of scenes that can be replayed as much as you want. To catch everything that's going on, this is absolutely necessary and will extend the oft-quoted time of below one hour massively.

I could talk about the characters and how they end up in a life-threatening accident (or so it seems) to ultimately uncover a massive plan that could change everything but endangers the crew of the Tacoma. There's also the small detail that Amy is not who we (or, importantly, her employer) think she is. She even has the ability to suddenly materialize arms and legs when a cutscene or interaction demands it, but lack a body at any other point in the game, as evidenced by looking down at the ground, no pesky body blocking the view - though that is beside the point. But I frankly don't think they actually matter. They are vessels to deliver insight into a future world.

Some claim this is an unusual walking sim, even bordering a more classic adventure game. I don't know what game they played. This might be the most standard walking sim I played yet. The recordings represent a device of looking into the past that is ubiquitous in the genre, be it the minigames in What Remains of Edith Finch, or the spectres of the past in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter,

What is noteworthy is that there are quite a few references to 2001: A Space Oddyssey in here. The AI ODIN is represented by an upside-down pyramid with an eye on each side, basically a reverse Yahweh. A lot of these details seem to convey a deeper meaning. Alas, digging into it does not yield much beyond mostly empty symbolism. And this is Tacoma's main problem, imho: There's not nearly as much here as it pretends to give. It's not bad, but it sports a lot of nothing.

Game: 6/10

List: 7/10

Difficulty: 2/10

Time: 3 hours

Plat #137 - 100% #211

Shiro

Twin Sisters

Get all other trophies

PS4

Shiro is a popular ethiopian dish made from chickpea... oh, wrong shiro. Let me try this again.

In the wondrous tradition of games named not after the protagonist but after the damsel in distress (see also Zelda), we have Shiro. Also one in the long, long line of games with women names - almost as many as songs by now.

It all begins when, while travelling to a temple in a dirigible balloon, a witch/bird demon/evil dudette appears to kidnap Shiro, the younger sister of the actual protagonist, Holo. Why does she do that? Who knows, who cares? After her! Not the most simplistic story I ever saw in a platformer, but that is mostly because I've seen plenty with no story at all. We never get to know who the witch-person-thing is (she has a name, but that's it and even that I already forgot two hours later) or why she abducted Shiro.

I died 100 times by the middle of the game and for what? Oh, right, a trophy!

What the game lacks in story, it makes up for in gameplay. This is an actually tough platformer, at times close to a rage game. While eventually everybody can get through thanks to the game being really short, quite a few sections are downright frustrating, especially in the second half with the Mushroom Cave and Red Mines. This is curtesy of a few kanji hovering in the air that can take in Holo and shoot her out like barrels in modern Donkey Kong games. The green ones shoot in one cardinal direction of choice, the red ones rotate and we must hit the button at the right moment. Add to that gravity apparently being a concern in the throwing toward the next step or kanji and we get a serious challenge based on timing and angles. Oh, the runes also have a time limit for aiming which is really bad when you try to shoot around while dodging sawblades.

There's a roughness to the whole thing. Level design and the actual challenges to overcome are well-designed, if ocassionally unfair-feeling. There's fun details like being able to cut some background stuff with our attacks. But the story is not even basic (might have been better to not have one at all so not to draw attention to it), and then there is the missing final boss fight. This one might have left the worst taste in my mouth: After two very challenging cave sections, we are back out in the open. We end up on a train and have to take what we learned to get to the front, though it's much easier than before. Finally, we reach the witch, demand of her to give up Shiro and then - the whole game ends with an anticlimactic scripted event and we aren't even who gets to defeat her.

It seriously feels like there's one final boss battle missing. And that did leave a sour taste in the end.

Game: 5/10

List: 6/10

Difficulty: 4/10

Time: 2.5 hours

Up next

Horror Tales and Dinobreak carry over from this week, both I have already started. To make this less horror-centric (because it's January, not October), another game leaving Plus Extra will be joining them: Lost Words should be easy enough to finish quickly before that happens.

shadaik · January 28

Straightforward week, one game finished, a title leaving Plus Extra soon:

Plat #138 - 100% #212

Lost Words: Beyond the Page

Platinum Guardian

Collect all trophies

PS4

I knew next to nothing about this game when I started it other than that it's leaving PS Plus next month and it's a short and easy game so I decided to finish it before that happens. How I didn't know puzzles me now that I played it.

The writing is headed by Rhianna Pratchett, one of the few actually well-known writers in gaming. While this is more of an indie title in scope and scale, the name alone should garner some attention.

It was originally a Stadia title, which sounds like it should work against it, but really, had Google really wanted to make Stadia a success, they should have put in a major marketing push for titles like this one, at least attempting to create a system seller for their ultimately short-lived platform.

Maybe it was the perception of and the demands for games at the time. Apparently, this game was criticized a lot for lack of challenge. And while Lost Words is indeed utterly devoid of challenge, this is perfectly fitting with what it is. Because what it is, besides absolutely beautiful, is the gaming equivalent of a poem. Challenge would just have distracted from what this actually tries to be, would have stopped the player from letting the tale sink in and digest properly. Because challenge creates emotions and this game is all about evoking a very different set of emotions.

It's about grief. And while it employs the old folklore idea of the "five stages of grief", it does so in a fashion that works an doesn't sound like kitchen table philosophizing as it often does. Instead, the stages are reflected in a fantasy story the viewpoint character writes throughout the game. The obstacles and her reactions to them are informed by how grief plays out.

The events play out in two layers - implicitly in said fantasy story and more explicit in the journal entries in between, written by the actual main character, a child who is dealing with her grandmother falling ill. Both sections have gameplay, and while the in-game story is a very light platformer in a visual style that borrows heavily from storybooks, the journal parts are more puzzle-oriented with using cut-out words to perform actions or serve as platforms to reach the next paragraph. The puzzles tend to be easy and obvious, keeping the flow of the story going while creating engagement. The dynamic nature of these pages makes it hard to properly represent them in screenshots, however.

This is a good one, though

This, again, manifests the concept of being more of an interactive poem to be read than a game to be conquered. While I do understand the complaints about lack of challenge, I do appreciate what this actually is a lot. And what it is, is beautiful.

I originally wanted to qualify this by stating how close it hits home, but let's be real: Some specifics aside, there are only a lucky few old enough to "get" this game who have not yet have to deal with the loss of a family member, especially a grandparent. I have no reason to pretend this does not hit close to home for almost everybody who'll play it.

Game: 9/10

List: 8/10

Difficulty: 1/10

Time: 5 hours

Up next

Minecraft coming up again is a bit of a surprise even to me. I didn't think they are something I'll ever 100% due to the multiplayer trophies. Well, that changed. Let's see if I write about Minecraft one more time. Also, let's get back to Dinobreak. It irks me I didn't yet finish it.

Shadaik's Battle of the Backlog

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