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Darling Baphomet's Altar


Darling Baphomet

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So, finally got a new place (wrote more about my sitch here.) and have my PS5 again, so it's time to get to platinuming games again - and hopefully make up for the last ~2 months that were for the most part a platless wasteland. 

 

168: Stonefly - 12.86%

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Here's a game I'd been waiting for a good sale for - and a month or two back, it hit 10$, so I finally decided to give it a try. I'd been watching out for it ever since I saw the trailers for it, which impressed me with the nifty concept of bug-shaped mech in a giant world and its colored pencil aesthetic.

 

In Stonefly, you play a runaway youth named Annika piloting a junker that she gradually builds up as she tries to recover her dad's stolen mech. It's a quaint, charming game through and through - the almost gentle coming of age narrative, the beautiful, giant foliage you find yourself leaping about, covered in soft, washed out hues, and the music, which is delicate even during battles. It's odd, comfortable, and very pretty. If leaping around giant trees and collecting minerals interspersed with occasional plot were the entirety of the game, I'd probably say it was a very chill... hopping simulator, let's call it. It's relaxing, cute, and while its story is a bit sparse, that somehow seems to mesh with the game's overall laidbackness. But, unfortunately...

 

Good god, the gameplay. I can appreciate an indie game deciding that it wants to do some weird ass shit just to feel something, and Stonefly's combat is truly unique, but throughout the game it just feels... half baked. Stonefly involves combat against various sorts of giant bugs, and I use the term 'combat' very loosely here, as you don't actually really have any proper attacks. You fly around the battlefield, as walking is completely useless, hitting enemies with a downwards shot until they flip over, at which point you can proceed to blow them off the arena. There is all of one attack in the game, and it does piss poor damage until you get the final upgrade, which doubles the damage; while you are given a vast array of powers, they are all crowd control. You can pull enemies in, you can blow them away, you can slow them down, you can push them away, and you can distract them - but you only get one attack, and for the majority of the game it's useless. Even your blowing abilities (... not like that) are extremely weak, barely moving enemies, which is problematic because an enemy might take 6 hits to down and then before you can blow them off they'll get back up and quickly regain all their health. To make matters worse, once you get past the early game, just about every enemy time can blow you halfway across the arena, sometimes KOing you instantly - which luckily doesn't mean instant death, but *does* eat up a bit of your health, which can result in your dash or even jump abilities being temporarily removed... which is a major nuisance in a game where if you're not constantly airborne, it's a problem. The combat is something like if you were playing Smash at a permanent 300% facing a dozen opponents locked at 0%.

 

It's not that the combat is irredeemable - it's not even that hard - it's just frustrating. I could dig the idea of playing in a weird bug mech, flying around and blowing enemies around - in some ways the eccentricity of your moveset fits the theme - but it just doesn't feel like much thought was put into it. At best, it's a curious oddity, and at worst it's a nuisance interrupting your giant forest strolls.

 

Besides that, the gameplay consists of a few things: firstly, maneuvering various giant biomes; the areas are large (if a bit empty) and have a lot of verticality, making exploring them quite interesting. Secondly, mining for resources to upgrade your mech with, unlocking new parts or designs. One such method is finding tracks for giant (even moreso than usual) bugs called Alpha Aphids, which once you have collected enough data for allow you to access a time limited mini game where you're running around the back of a giant bug, mining as much as you can and trying to avoid the hoards of insects that chase you down. Third is the aforementioned upgrades - buying and selling resources to be able to afford customizing your rig. When I heard it was a mech game, I had hoped you'd be able to use different mechs over time, each with distinct movesets; however being able to significantly customize your mech's appearance and unlock a large array of abilities for a time keeps a steady sense of progression throughout.

 

Perhaps fortunately, the game isn't that long. It's new and interesting, and very unlike anything I've played before. Its levels and music are beautiful, and the aesthetic alone makes me glad I played it. By the time you've started to get tired of the combat, you'll be almost done with the game; and so, even if it's not something I'd indulge in just for the sake of it, it does well enough to add some meat to this short trip through the forest, as does the resource gathering and mech upgrading. I probably would have regretted buying it at full price, but it's a solid game for 10$, as charming as it is awkward.

 

Edit: Whoops, somehow this post doubled itself. Fixed.

Edited by Darling Baphomet
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  • 2 weeks later...

169: Hades - 27.85%

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Fun fact: I bought this almost exactly a year ago, just a bit before my birthday - and I platinumed it just yesterday, with my next birthday currently a day away, which strikes me as a funny little coincidence.

 

You probably don't need me to tell you about Hades given that it was the indie darling of 2021. It's another fantastic game from Supergiant studios (had to google that, because I always confuse them with Supermassive), who I've been following ever since they released Bastion. I don't know if I'd say that Hades is my favorite game from them - Bastion still holds a place in my heart that's hard to compete with - but it's certainly their most impressive thus far; fantastic music, gorgeous visuals, and a metric fuckton of different abilities and weapons all make this a lovely roguelike. Hades feels like a culmination of their last three games, almost as if they were all building up to it - it has the almost visual novel-esque emphasis on dialogue and rich story of Pyre, the gameplay and weapon diversity of Bastion, and the heavily modifiable abilities of Transistor.

 

Initially I was a bit unsure about Hades because the runs did not feel all that varied - as is common with a lot of newer roguelikes, there's one fixed boss per floor, who receives only minor changes should you choose to select the appropriate pact of punishment (think more customizable ascension levels from Slay the Spire), your weapon of choice will more or less act the same regardless of what upgrades you get for it during the run, and you can't get, say, every god's blessing simultaneously on your attack. This makes it a lot more subtle than roguelikes like Binding of Isaac, which allow you to go absolutely balls to the walls in terms of powering up - but as I learned how skills worked together and began working on builds, I started to quite like the more refined gameplay the strictness of Hades allows for. The gameplay is solid, the boons are all fun to play with (although not necessarily good on every weapon - e.g. fixed damage boons are much more effective on fast firing weapons than slow ones, while the opposite is true for percentage based boons), and there's a large amount of things to invest in in the hub world - your relationships with other characters, upgrades for what you receive during runs, a vaguely skill tree-esque perk system, and weapons with a variety of different variants which you can upgrade to make more effective. It's meaty.

 

The gameplay is great, but one of the largest draws to Hades is its setting and story - and these do not disappoint, either. The gods present in game are all very well adapted and are a joy to interact with, and they're brought to life by Supergiant's distinctive art style. Despite the fact that you're limited to your little underworld hub and the dungeons you proceed through, you end up developing quite an affinity for the various gods that grant you their favor, and there's a large cast of characters in the underworld whom you can actually interact with in person, none of whom are particularly dull. The story follows Zagreus (who displays suspicious similarities to a certain Homestuck character), described once as the god of blood, and his attempts to escape the underworld and find his birth mother against his father's wishes. As you complete more runs and get closer to the exit, you learn more about his past and about the dynamics of his family and of the underworld in general, leading to a rather satisfying ending. (Although, not to spoil anything, but his father is negligent at best and abusive at worst, and that never feels properly addressed. Also, the epilogue is absolutely god awful simply because of how low effort it is.) The story did a better job of keeping me engaged than just about every roguelike I've played, except maybe Returnal - although the big twist of that game completely ruined it for me, and as such I would rank Hades higher than it overall.

 

There's not much more to say about the game, I think - the soundtrack is fantastic (though not quite at the level of Bastion or Transistor, IMO), and again, there's a large variety of weapons, items that give you passive buffs, and even summons you can utilize, allowing for a wide variety of builds. The trophy hunting journey for this game was relatively straightforward, with the caveat that collecting all the weapon upgrades and maxing out Patroclus' relationship was a pain in the ass due to RNG - I spent probably 15-20 runs each on the last two upgrades I needed. This is not a game where you want to leave the trophy hunting until the end. You'll want to be passively working towards it throughout (which I luckily did to some extent - I can't imagine how grindy it would have been if I hadn't.)

 

Also, nice.

Edited by Darling Baphomet
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170: What Lies In The Multiverse - 26.92%

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Here's another indie I'd been keeping my eye on for a while, and picked up as soon as it received an acceptable discount. What Lies In the Multiverse is a narrative heavy puzzle platformer which cleverly utilizes the familiar gimmick of allowing you to switch between planes of reality, allowing you to manipulate the environment in different ways, or perhaps utilize platforms that are present in one universe but not another. Tonally, it reminds me of a somewhat more serious Rick and Morty, with the caveat that the 'Morty' is a boy genius instead of a complete dipshit, and there's far less random violence (although the game is similarly dark regardless.)

 

Gameplay wise, What Lies in the Multiverse is fun, but not quite groundbreaking. We've had quite a few games now where you switch between perspectives or variants of levels to progress - Fez and Eversion come to mind, although the game is much closer to Eversion, as most of the alternate universes are rather morbid, often depressingly so. Besides the gimmick, many of the puzzles are fairly standard fare, and something like half of the game doesn't utilize dimension switching, leaving you with rather simple puzzles consisting of putting boxes on buttons, climbing vines, and moving crates around. The puzzles are rather short and regularly interspersed with cutscenes, so you don't get tired of them, but you definitely feel the absence of the game's namesake gimmick in the levels where you're confined to only your present universe. The puzzles that do utilize dimension switching are, as you might expect, a lot more entertaining - switching universes mid jump so as to use a platform that wasn't there, using boxes that exist in separate realities to construct stairs up to wherever you need to go, etc. The game's never boring, although it's not revolutionary, either - I'd put it at a solid 8/10, where it's good enough to make you want to keep playing, but the story and diverse settings are what really make the game.

 

The story is... interesting. The game begins with you, an apparent computer prodigy, writing a program to simulate parallel universes, which causes a dimensional disturbance and teleports you to g*d knows where. After wandering through the first level, you run into Everett, an eccentric universe travelling old man with an extremely obnoxious fashion sense. He's kind of a dickwad, but allows the kid to come along regardless. Much of the story is played for laughs, taking the tone of a heartwarming buddy comedy - despite rather morbid scenes in alternate universes, for example a father and daughter you encounter happily camping in one universe, but find a note indicating the father cannibalized his daughter in the other, which hint at the game's later darker themes. The later parts of the game start to get more serious and begin becoming worthy of the trigger warning you're presented with upon booting up the game. For the most part, it's a straightforward (albeit dimension jumping) journey to a destination sort of plotline, where you travel through various locations while evading capture by what seem to be multiverse police of some sort. For much of the game, the story is quite compelling - the characters are eccentric and mysterious, the locales are beautiful, and there's enough mysteries to keep you guessing as to how it all fits together. Then the seriousness starts to ramp up, and the game begins to deal with trauma and the like, and... that's where it starts to disappoint a bit, leading to a somewhat awkward ending which feels a bit rushed, partially due to the rapid increase in rather unwieldy translation errors. I can't fully describe my feelings on the game without spoiling it, so I will do so below. If you plan on playing the game, I'd advise you to skip the next section.

 

MAJOR PLOT SPOILERS (and inane ranting) BELOW

 

Spoiler

So, the story is... awkward. The game tries to deal with trauma and other serious subjects, as mentioned, but the way it deals with them is bizarre. The first major example of this is a member of the aforementioned multiverse police force, Nash, who is an obnoxious dickhead who encounters the duo multiple times and keeps shooting (more like tazing, really) the kid. Despite his superior repeatedly telling him to lay off, he continues to pursue them obsessively, desperate to prove himself to his boss. Finally after several failed attempts, with the duo having been captured by one of his colleagues, he returns covered in bandages and in a cast, and Everett, finally sick of his shit, proceeds to lay into him with extreme cruelty, causing a mental breakdown where he begins sobbing and pounding the bridge he's on, destroying it. The kid later comments that he was unnecessarily cruel, to which Everett just says that he can't handle people who can't deal with their own problems. He then encounters Nash's boss, who punches him in the face and proceeds to capture him for real, and it's revealed that Nash is dead. It's unclear whether or not the destruction of the bridge should be treated as a suicide, but given Everett having laid into him just previously, it seems to be the implication that he pushed him over the edge.

 

The problem is, everything about Nash is handled terribly. He electrocuted a child multiple times with it being played up for laughs - which is never brought up or really discussed - and yet we're expected to take his obsessive behavior as having been indicative of mental illness instead of just similarly comedic asshole behavior. Given the circumstances, Everett is kind of justified in telling him to go fuck himself, but the game treats it as a major mask slip for Everett. Kind of? Him and the boss later talk about Nash, and the only closure we get regarding him is that she shouldn't have let someone with such obvious psychological issues work the case. Everett's behavior is clearly meant to be awful and is initially portrayed as such, and yet not only is the way it's treated inconsistent with the story leading up to it, but the game can't even commit to its questionable direction.

 

Worse still, Nash's death convinces one of his colleagues (and then several others, and finally even the boss) to give up chasing Everett, convinced that their hunting of him was the reason Nash had died and that Everett was Right All Along. There's a few problems with this - why have they been chasing him for all this time if their cause is so flimsy and easily dismissed? if they suspected he had a good reason for everything he was doing, why did they persist? It's all very inconsistent. It's worth mentioning that these people were all friends before Everett stole his universe traveling device back, and so in a way, this is a heartwarming twist, if a bit silly, and you expect to be led up to a happy ending where Everett saves the multiverse or resurrects his dead assistant (whose disappearance was traumatic for Everett), but... then shit absolutely hits the fan.

 

After a dramatic sequence where Everett disappears into a super anomaly, the kid is teleported to his old mansion, where he begins to find log entries both from Everett and his assistant. Everett's entries are bizarre - he describes researching some kind of anomaly, likely similar to the one he disappeared into, only to come out with no memory of it and desperate to figure out what happened in there. He begins being haunted by 'shapes' in his dreams and starts talking about a 'them', and apparently develops anger issues related to his experience, and begins drinking heavily. One of the pages claims that 'they' killed his assistant and he had to hide the evidence. This is supposed to be a big reveal that he was actually crazy all along, but none of his behavior is actually insane throughout the game; at worst he seems to be a man with anger issues and perhaps PTSD. Upon reading these log entries, I came out with the assumption that there was going to be some mysterious force we were going to have to reconcile with that had been haunting Everett - but then the kid meets up with Everett, and he shouts at him, saying that he's seen all the evidence of his craziness and that he murdered his assistant. Which I suppose is a reasonable conclusion, but given that there's no big moment wherein the kid is like, "oh my god, he killed his assistant!" until he's literally shouting it at the man makes for whiplash.

 

Then Everett gives us a speech about how destiny ruins people's lives and he wants to use chaos (presumably the anomalies that have increasingly been altering the fabric of reality) to free the universe from destiny and undo the harm he's done. It's kind of like Van from Tales of the Abyss, with the key difference that Van was a consistently written villain while Everett just kind of suddenly turns on you. The kid proceeds to shout him down and call him a murderer with a conviction I, as the player, could not share, and eventually makes him have a breakdown after he calls him a coward, leading to him sobbing and then... punching the kid.

 

After this, the kid wakes up in a hospital. He tells the universe cops about what he discovered, and they believe him instantly and are shocked to find out he was a murderer, and vow to take revenge against him... only to immediately afterwards decide that Everett has probably decided to be good since he's one with the chaos and they see an anomaly shrinking into nothingness, presumably indicative of him repairing the multiverse. Most of the crew decides it's time to give up the hunt for good and that it's not worth it, because he probably wants to do good. I think I'd have less whiplash on a crashing plane. We go from Everett being this asshole (in a very Rick-ish way) but reliable traveling companion, to an abusive dick who led to someone's death (ignoring their own villainous behavior), to a good guy who needs to be allowed to complete his journey, to a murderer, to a space god that should be left alone to fix the multiverse. At the very least, this makes his former friends / adversaries seem extremely weak willed and non committal, given they were willing to chase this man for a long time for presumably no good reason, give that up and decide he was right all along, then after finding out he was a murderer and their hunt was justified they're incensed for a few moments and go back to letting him do whatever.

 

It's just so tonally inconsistent and such a bizarre path for the plot to take. It was clear that Everett had trauma throughout the game and needed to voice his issues, and this could easily have been done in a way that acknowledged his failings but continued to present him as a likable character, but instead they chose to make him into an insane murderer only to immediately give him a redemption. I'm reminded of a video (I believe by hbomberguy?) about RWBY where it's speculated that the creators just kept seeing cool things in anime and wanted to mimic that without actually knowing why the cool thing is there or being willing to commit to it. The worst thing is that the writing is fantastic up until the big reveal, and then it all falls apart, plot unraveling and sentences increasingly filled with bizarre grammatical errors that I can only assume are the result of a non-native speaker writing them - but most of the game was written fantastically. Did the writers just quit? Did the translation team quit? Like, what the fuck happened?

 

... But, despite my gripes, I enjoyed What Lies in the Multiverse. It's a fun romp through exotic locales, complete with bizarre, reality defying gimmicks, and a likable duo of characters whose interactions make up the heart of the game and do not disappoint (for the most part.) Ending disappointments or not, this is one of the better indie games I've played in the last year or two, and I'd highly recommend it with a decent discount. The puzzles are enjoyable, the settings are interesting and vary greatly, the graphics are gorgeous and surprisingly high effort, and the writing is fantastic, save for the unfortunate times when it's not.

Edited by Darling Baphomet
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Triple feature today! I'd meant to write a post for VTM Bloodhunt yesterday, but I've since platinumed Industria and Back 4 Blood as well, so... here goes?

 

171: Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt - 3.91%

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Another ubiquitous entry in the recent wave of VTM games everyone mistakes for VTM Bloodlines 2, Bloodhunt is a surprisingly competent next gen battle royale. I have a love hate relationship with BRs - while I often enjoy them (see my Realm Royale platinum and hundreds of hours in Fortnite), I often find their format, and the emphasis on survival over combat, to be something of a bore. Bloodhunt manages to dodge a fair bit of my usual criticisms of Battle Royales by having much smaller matches and maps (usually around 30 people), NPCs to battle and feed on, and a variety of traversal abilities which make for a very fluid, fast paced BR.

 

For the most part, Bloodhunt is fairly standard fare for a Battle Royale - you can queue up solo or with three other people, and there's a recently added TDM mode which is a blast, although it starts you off with full resonance (essentially passive buffs you get from feeding) which takes away some of the game's strategy. As with most BRs, much of the game is spent scavenging, however part of the appeal of Bloodhunt is that it features camps of NPC soldiers you can kill and feast on, and civilians that each offer you a different type of resonance - melee damage, health regeneration, and shorter cooldowns for your abilities, and if you're playing solo, extra lives. The beginning of the game is thus largely spent not only on the usual searching for better gear, but also hunting down civilians whose blood resonance you can build around, and picking off some other players or NPC enemies to feed on to increase your resonance slots. Combined with the relatively short matches and smaller map, it's altogether a more engaging experience than the usual hide in bush simulator experience you'll find in a lot of other BRs. Solo play in particular allows you to play very aggressively, getting into firefights and then chasing down an extra life civilian any time you die. I've had games where I've died 5+ times and still got into the top 3 at the end. Team play is standard fare, however - you can self-rez while you're downed in any mode, but if you get finished off your team has to go to a resurrection point to bring you back into the game.

 

The game offers a variety of classes (called archetypes in game) to pick from, each (save for the only post-launch addition) coming in pairs assigned to certain factions. There's the close range Brujah brawlers, who are more survivable in close combat and have massive leaps; the sneaky Nosferatu, who play around invisibility and stealth and have an invisible dash, the Toreadors, who are essentially support characters and can teleport, and finally the sole Venture character, who can temporarily go invincible and has a short range shoulder bash, but no movement abilities besides. The classes are all distinct from eachother, especially so between clans, and allow for a variety of builds and play styles which I find quite gratifying. The weapons are also diverse - you have the typical assortment of shotguns, long range rifles, pistols (including dual wielded pistols), assault rifles, and so on and so forth, with the addition of some more interesting weapons such as the minigun, two different crossbows that fire explosive arrows and poison cloud arrows respectively, and a variety of melee weapons, the purple variants of which give you extra abilities - a deflect for the katana, and a short range dash strike for the dual swords. Melee is surprisingly fun, and the gunplay is fantastic.

 

Now for the problems: first of all, the game is dying. Queue times are becoming increasingly long even with crossplay on - and this game's crossplay implementation is a problem in and of itself, since console players can be matched against PC players, but not with, and there's no cross platform parties. From a trophy standpoint, leveling up your character is also an immense chore, as every match gives you the same amount of account xp - I eventually ended up relenting and just going for the "spamming suicide" method just to level up at a reasonable rate. Which is somewhat sad, as I quite liked the game, but between the current battle pass being rather mediocre, the dwindling player count, and the botched crossplay implementation meaning I have nobody to play with, I decided I'd put in quite enough time with the game by the time I decided to simply grind out quick deaths.

 

All in all it's a very solid game, but it bears the curse of just about every BR that isn't Fortnite, Apex Legends, PUBG, or Fall Guys. I've ranted about it before, but I really do hate how multiplayer games have become reliant on closed lobby based matchmaking; I've seen quite a few games I like start dying off just because they can't maintain the obscenely high playercount required to sustain them. Meanwhile, even mods like TF2 classic manage to have constant, 20 player games going with a playerbase that rarely breaks 100 active players because they use a method of multiplayer that isn't fundamentally fucking atrocious. I can't fathom why the industry seems to have decided that being able to instantly hop into a match and play for as long as you want with no interruptions save for loading new maps is inferior to sitting in a lobby for five minutes waiting for a game. Battle royales are pretty much the epitome of this problem - at least in smaller games, like Overwatch, you only need to secure 12 or so players at a time, but the obscene amount of players required for a BR match means that even larger games like Fortnite have to pad their matches with bots to ensure reasonable queue times. Bloodhunt has relatively small matches with only 30 players per match, but even then it increasingly struggles to fill those (even with an average playerbase on Steam of 600, plus however many are on Epic and PS5), and naturally the longer you have to sit in queue between matches, the less fun you're having, which further drives people away.

 

172: Industria - 42.22%

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Industria is a gorgeous Half-Like 2-like that wears its inspirations on its sleeve - much of the game feels like playing through next gen version of Half-Life 2's city 17, between the eastern European architecture and physics based puzzles. The environments are absolutely gorgeous, particularly for an indie game, and every scene is detailed to the point of absurdity - between the atmospheric lighting, plant life interspersed through scenes, and props scattered everywhere, you can tell it was made with an astounding attention to detail.

 

There's only one problem - it's not really a good game. Which is to say, while it is good, it's more like the beginning of a good game. The game is only a few hours long, and doesn't even really resolve its own plot before dropping you on a cliffhanger; it's clearly meant to be part of a series, and it shows. If Industria were a full length game, it would be fantastic - but as is, you're only really getting the start of what will hopefully be a much larger story. But, again, this is an impressive effort for an indie team, and they clearly went for a quality over quantity approach. The weapons all look and feel great (although there's only four guns and a mining pick, which makes for a limited loadout), the enemies, while all robots, are diverse and detailed - you can shoot parts of them in combat, and do enough damage to them and they'll catch on fire, usually panicking and running away before finally dropping dead, if you don't finish them yourself. For what it is, it's fantastic, and it really does feel like you're playing a hyperrealistic Dishonored (thematically, not gameplay wise) or Half-Life 2. If they can keep it up and release similarly high quality sequels, this'll eventually be a fantastic story that's very worth playing. As is, I can't really say the average gamer would feel content playing 20$ for this.

 

The game's story is somewhat basic - you play as a woman who works at some kind of research facility which is being overrun by an AI, and try to follow your boyfriend (or husband? It's not really specified) through a teleporter, only to arrive in a desolate, clearly abandoned city overrun with robots. Essentially, the game starts at the Half-Life 2 time skip. Much of the story is just made up of navigating through the city while chatting with man who saved your life and was left in the city because he's crippled - it's not the most exciting plot out there, but it's serviceable. You're not really playing this game for the plot, though, you're playing for the atmosphere, and what an atmosphere there is - looking down at the massive cityscape, running through moodily lit alleys, and navigating through buildings are all made into adventures in and of themselves just because of the love and care put into the game. This is to say nothing of the ethereal, black and white 'library' you explore between levels, and the occasional giant alien figured you see in the distance.

 

With that said... the game is clearly made by an indie team, and is appropriately janky at times. It looks gorgeous, but runs at 30fps on PS5 as a result. There's issues with the... I don't know what to call it - essentially, when you turn your head, you often see blank spaces for a split second before the environment loads in, presumably because the game only loads in what you're currently looking at. There's also a few bugs - saving, for whatever reason, resets the environment, and at one point I had to sequence break in order to avoid having to restart my hardcore run - you have to pull a lever to open doors, but I saved after pulling the lever, resulting in not being able to pull it again but the doors being closed. I was able to jump off of the balcony to get past the closed door just right, and managed to survive with less than 5% of my health, but otherwise I would have softlocked my game. The puzzles are also a bit silly at times - one such puzzle requires stacking boxes to get up a ledge, with the problem being that the platforms leading to that ledge are so low that unless your character has the musculature of an infant, there is no conceivable reason she couldn't just climb it.

 

However, the whole game looks like this, and I think it's fucking gorgeous.

 

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173: Back 4 Blood -  5.26%

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... Ah yes, another "white on transparent background" trophy that's literally unviewable on the forum. I had to manually give it a background color in GIMP for it to be actually visible.

 

Here's Back 4 Blood, everyone's favorite current gen Left 4 Dead clone. Well, sort of Left 4 Dead clone. The game's... interesting. Between card based loadouts that massively change your gameplay style, much tougher special infected, punishing boss zombies (I will not be calling them ridden), and an actual final boss, it's safe to say it's fair bit different than the games it clearly drew inspiration from. But it's a damn good game, and it's only become better in the last year, as the devs have polished up and added to the admittedly lacking base game experience. In some ways it even surpasses L4D1 & 2, in particular with the abundance of gameplay diversity offered by the builds and unique character skills, although campaign versus mode is sorely missed, and the game's PVP survival gamemode failed to fill its niche and is essentially dead as a result.

 

At launch, this game was... not incredible. Playing with bots sucked ass, playing with randoms sucked even more ass, and the game had persistent glitches which caused ridiculous amounts of special infected to spawn. The slow burn of getting one card every level also made the game much more hard, as some builds (e.g. medic & melee) were virtually useless for the first few levels, making them a low damage hellscape to play through. But now we're two DLCs and a fuckton of patches in, and Back 4 Blood has shaped up into a fantastic game.

 

At its core, Back 4 Blood takes the four player co-op gameplay of Left 4 Dead, and rolls with it, save for the aforementioned additions. There's a few additions to the game - a shop to upgrade your items in, weapon rarities, attachments for your guns, and with the first DLC, randomly chosen zombie hives which offer fantastic loot if you're willing to brave them and add some spice to every campaign run. The campaign does suffer from repetition some, as one level is reused three or four times in different variations as the crew keeps setting out from the same base, but for the most part, the acts are each a linear crawl through diverse sets of levels, and each act offers something unique to the table. You churn through hordes of zombies (quite literally, if you're playing a meat blender melee build), frequently punctuated by various special infected who more or less fill the archetypes of Left 4 Dead zombies - there's the Crushers, the Hunters / Smokers, and the Boomers. Each type of special infected has three (four, with the DLC) variants which further diversifies them - it's not quite as good a system as Left 4 Dead's, where you could recognize each type of special infected based on silhouette alone, but it becomes rather easy to spot them once you know what you're looking for. This is all supported by solid gunplay, the aforementioned build diversity, and a unique cast of characters, each of whom have their own personalities and an abundance of (sometimes obnoxious) dialogue that plays through levels, with the added benefit of not being locked to a certain four characters for dialogue like you were in Left 4 Dead - no matter your combination of characters, you'll be hearing witty (and often awful) commentary from them.

 

Back 4 Blood shines as a co-op game, particularly if you can get a few people willing to invest in the game - the game is at its best when you have a coordinated team with builds that complement eachother, and it truly does outshine Left 4 Dead at times with just how much extra gameplay variety there is (save for the lack of custom maps.) Every character has their own personal and team buffs as well, which adds a further layer of strategy - does your team need Evangelo's move speed bonus, Karlee's use speed (used for revives and interacting with objective objects), or Sharice's armor plating? The game is also, naturally, playable solo with bots or with randoms, however in these scenarios you're forced to play a lot more jack of all trades-y because of not being able to rely on random players to have quality builds. Solo can actually be preferable to playing with randoms in this regard, since while the bots are more side characters than equals, their abundance of team buffs in their decks, immunity to trauma damage, and frequent ammo dropping allows you to essentially play the game as the protagonist without having to worry too much about team play. I ended up completing nightmare solo, since while I do have friends to play with, none of them are quite as devoted as I am (including the one who bought it for me to play with them), and I found solo to be quite enjoyable.

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174: Sid Meier's Civilization VI - 3.68%

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A few days late on this one as I decided to wrap up all the DLC trophies as well - something I usually don't bother with when games have loads of them, the few notable exceptions being this, Skyrim VR, and Doom 2016. After around 200 hours (the PS5 time tracker says 264, but I'm not sure I trust it) and ten straight days of putting 12+ hours into it a day, I'm proud to say I finally have all the trophies for Civ 6.

 

First of all, let me make one thing clear: this is a terrible port. The best way to play this game is undoubtedly on PC, if only because I'm sure modders have picked up the devs' slack. Unless you don't have a good PC (or if you just really want to platinum this game), I'd avoid playing the console versions of Civ 6. The issues are abundant. Multiple menus' scroll bars will simply stop working (and work less often than they don't), resulting in things like me having to blindly try and select the city I want to assign a new governor to by counting selections until I hit the right city - an especially infuriating bug because there's another menu for city selection which works fine, and doesn't have ridiculously large buttons for each city. Then there's the crashes. Good lord, the crashes. During my recent marathon of the game, I was experiencing probably 2-3 crashes a day, which is particularly unnerving due to the fact that I've had my save files corrupted by said crashes 4 times, which hard locks the game while it's starting and can only be fixed by downloading a previous save from the cloud or deleting your save - unfortunate news if you were 10 hours into a campaign and hadn't closed the game to sync it. Even on PS5, in the later phases of the game it would frequently freeze for a minute or longer, to the point where I was afraid it had crashed again, only to resume as normal. Those are the big things, but there are an abundance of smaller issues you'll notice as well. The game has been abandoned in this state, as the final update launched in April 2021.

 

... With that out of the way, Civilization 6 is, in regards to its console controls, a surprisingly competent port. It's easy enough to work around and I rarely felt I was being significantly hindered by not playing it with a mouse and keyboard. It performs smoothly on PS5, although the waits in between turns can still get very long in the endgame. With all its DLC, it's a very fun, detailed little strategy game, with a variety of game modes and civilizations that each feel, sound, and look distinct. Civilization is sometimes thought of as being the "baby's first 4X" series, and that's not an inaccurate description - it's very easy to get into, while still maintaining quite a bit of complexity, and in my hundreds of hours there were quite a few features I almost never used *coughmilitaryengineerscough* and given I beat deity while doing so I think it's safe to say the game has put a lot of effort into being approachable to newbies to the genre.

 

The game's fundamentally just a lot of fun - from picking your leader and formulating a game plan based on their abilities to spreading out across the map and attaining supremacy, you're unlikely to get bored during the day or days it can take to finish a game. The addition of new victory conditions such as the world congress and the associated diplomatic victory (technically present in Civ 5 but extremely unreliable) and religion as an actual viable game path additionally adds a lot of flavor to each playthrough - do you go for conquest, or spam campuses and go for the space race? Even in games where I had no intentions of attempting a religious victory, I often founded a religion anyway just because religion offers perks that can assist with other win conditions, e.g. extra production, science, or culture. There's so many things to do and so many viable paths to victory that taking your civilization from the stone age to the future is almost always a refreshing experience. When Civ 6 is working right, it's a glorious experience; the game's motto of "one more turn" holds true, and my partners can attest to this game having completely ruined my sleep schedule. (The platinum trophy's name, no more turns, is an amusing nod to the game's addictive nature.)

 

As mentioned before, I played the game with all its DLC, so I can't speak for the state of the base game on its own; it is generally held that Civ 6, like 5, is massively improved by its expansions, and this is for the most part true. The addition of dark and golden ages, the loyalty system (wherein you must keep loyalty up or risk losing cities), and governs in Rise and Fall wholly expand the game - Gathering Storm (which includes all but Rise and Fall's new civilizations, if you want to buy it alone) I found a bit more tedious - climate change, while interesting from an outside perspective, is distinctly less fun to actually play with as coastal cities and districts get flooded, volcanos erupt, et cetera. Luckily, it's not too widespread and more just a minor nuisance (unless you turn the disaster intensity up to max), and the expansion adds the world congress and new units and civilizations, so overall I would recommend it.

 

The New Frontier pass, which is to say the pack of character bundles, is a harder sell - the new civilizations are fun enough to play with, however paying for merely a bunch of new leaders was a turn off for me for quite a while, and so it took some time before I actually bothered buying it. Once I did, I was pleasantly surprised by the new additions - the civilizations themselves are neat, but more importantly they add new game modifiers that you can apply: barbarian clans becoming entities you can negotiate with that turn into city states, dark and heroic ages being intensified making for much more chaotic games, secret societies you can dedicate yourself to which give unique and very significant bonuses to your civilizations, summonable hero units that have powerful abilities such as creating new resources and instantly deleting enemy units, the ability to form corporations and monopolies once you have enough of resources, a (rather annoying, IMO) zombie invasion mode, and an apocalypse mode which includes a new unit that can summon disasters. While a few of these I found to be nuisances, namely apocalypse mode and dramatic ages, I ended up playing almost every game with corporations, heroes, and secret societies. They're not quite worth 40$, but if you can get the pass at a steep discount, combined with the new civilizations they're very easily worth 15-20$.

 

Lastly, the plactinum journey for this game is... a lot. Many of the trophy requirements are ridiculous and unlikely to ever be achieved in normal play - Luftballons, for instance, which asks that you bomb an enemy city with a plane whose base originates on the Nena continent (continents have random names assigned to them, of which Nena is one) while also having nine observation balloons on top of it, essentially requiring constantly restarting the game until you get spawned on the Nena continent. Similarly, one trophy requires you to take Charles Darwin to the Galapagos Islands, with the problem being that Darwin does not necessarily spawn in every game, and even when he does, all the civilizations compete to earn great scientists. There are some good guides for every trophy (including DLC trophies) on Steam, luckily, but nevertheless this is one of the more convoluted platinums I've acquired in my time.

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Great set of reviews and musings, wanted to say thank you specifically for the review of Astroneer; I'm always looking for something to suggest to a group of co op friends and this seems right up our street!

 

Also I've been wanting to play Civ vi for ages, I was addicted to the very first one and only briefly dabbled in any one since as I rarely bother with pc, I know it's not a 1:1 move to put them on ps4 but it's hard to find people talking about the level of functionality in detail, I've taken heart from the fact that although you came across some annoying issues you persevered so thank you, from he who makes small insects tremble, please accept the knowledge that I will be starting very soon as tribute and I hereby offer lasting peace with my people, the shoe people.

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Been meaning to write this one up for a bit but I've been struggling to find the time between Cyberpunk 2077, The Binding of Isaac (yes, I am going for that extremely cursed 100%), and Splatoon 3. My PS5 controller died on me for a week so I was stuck playing PS4 games for a while, and in that time I decided to give Superliminal a fair shot.

 

175: Superliminal - 17.10%

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Superliminal is one of two impossible geometry based puzzle games I've been keeping an eye on for a while now, with the other being Manifold Garden (which I might have a write up for in a few weeks' time). Of the two, Manifold Garden appears to be the one more focused on impossible geometry and puzzles surrounding them, while Superliminal concentrates on liminal spaces and perspective puzzles.

 

The main gimmick of Superliminal is perspective - but that's not to say it's the gimmick, but rather that there's a few gimmicks in there that all share that common theme. The most common one, which you'll be utilizing throughout the game, is the ability to pick up items and have them appear the same size to you while holding them, no matter how near or far they are - meaning that by walking up to an object until it takes up much of the screen, then lining it up to be farther away, you'll increase its size. I could detail the others, but that would spoil the fun, wouldn't it? Needless to say, the game's got a number of tricks up its sleeves, some made up of truly ingenious physics wizardry, while some are more akin to optical illusions - but throughout it all lies the theme of perspective.

 

That theme also ties into the game's story - which isn't some masterpiece of writing, but manages to be rather encouraging and a suitable backdrop for the game's puzzles, which are, of course, the primary draw here. The gist of the story is that you're going through a guided sort of dream therapy - I'm often put off by 'it was all a dream' or similar cop outs, however in this game it is executed perfectly and is actually necessary for the narrative as opposed to a final fuck you to what had once been a gripping narrative (hello, Returnal!) You probably won't be pondering the meaning of the story, but it's more than adequate and comforting in a strange way - parts of it even reminded me of past psychedelic experiences.

 

The puzzles and atmosphere are the main draw of the game, and they are both great. While the game is rather short (there's a trophy for beating the game in under 35 minutes), the puzzles are diverse and interesting, switching gimmicks frequently, making for an experience which never quite gets old or worn out, as it's always giving you new tools or rules to play with. They're never all that hard - the game is closer to being a walking simulator interspersed with puzzles than it is something like the Talos Principle, although there were a few that genuinely had me stumped and took a fair amount of trying to solve. The atmosphere is similarly diverse - you never spend too long in one location, and as the game progresses its feel changes quite a few times (one segment, for instance, almost has horror vibes.) The setting plays a major role in keeping the game fresh, as the environment often ties directly into where the narrative is at in a way that would be difficult if it was grounded in any sort of fixed world.

 

Overall, it's a very solid game, and if you can pick it up on sale I'd most certainly recommend it. You can probably expect to platinum it in ten hours or so - less if you're more competent at it than I was - so the full price is a bit of a hard sell, but at 50% off it's hard to say no to.

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176: Cyberpunk 2077 - 11.84%

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We were all there for Cyberpunk 2077's nightmare of a launch, but it's safe to say that since 2020, it's undergone something of a redemption arc... kind of. Between the next gen versions of the game running smoothly and relatively bug free and the success of the recent Cyberpunk anime adaptation, CP2077's been experiencing something of a resurgence. Has the game undergone a miraculous transformation? Not quite. It is disappointing for many of the same reasons it was disappointing at launch. But now that the game runs well and isn't constantly breaking, you can play the game for what it is - which is a pretty good, Ubisoft-esque open world game with some heavy RPG elements. If you come into the game expecting that, you'll likely enjoy it.

 

Where to start? The game puts you in the shoes of V, a small time merc with grand aspirations and a ticking time bomb in their head that serves as the game's bit of artificial urgency. You get to choose one of three life paths, which aren't all that significant outside of the starting segment - the corpo life path gives you a unique side quest later in the game, but beyond that the life path only seems to give you unique dialogue options here and there, which is admittedly more than some other character based RPGs like Mass Effect have done. Once your introductory mission is done with, you're thrust into the main story, which is engaging, but does not offer too much in the way of choices up until the ending and is painfully short - I thought I was maybe a third of the way through the game when I found out my next mission was the point of no return, leading me to take a 30 hour or so break chasing down sidequests and the painful amount of generic open world activities before the game's end. The complaints about much of the story cut seem to have some merit given the very short length - again, what main story missions there are are all competently put together and very enjoyable to play through, but between the painfully short length and some bizarre, seemingly contextless dialogue after the point of no return, it does feel like the game had a good chunk taken out of it. Which is a shame, because the missions are great. The endings, oddly enough, do not share these failings - while in many choice based RPGs and similar games, the endings are often the most clearly rushed part of the game, sometimes amounting to nothing but minute long cutscenes (e.g. Call of Cthulhu), Cyberpunk's endings are fantastic. Each ending is wildly diverse, each giving you upwards of an hour of unique content on par with the main story quests. The secret ending was by far my favorite, and I recommend googling its requirements because it is ridiculously easy to miss and it's not required for the platinum (though it does lead into other endings), so you won't find details in a trophy guide.

 

Given how short the main storyline is, much of your game time is going to spent roaming Night City, doing side quests and rinse and repeat gigs and reported crimes (essentially go here, shoot people, loot item quests). The city is absolutely gorgeous, and it feels like a lot of love went into perfecting it and its oppressive, dystopian atmosphere, which it manages quite well. However, due to the lack of meaningful content it can sometimes feel empty - there are a half dozen or so questlines which are absolutely fantastic and largely on par with the main story quests, but outside of that side quests will amount to "go here to receive a new gun / car" or low effort objectives that are little more than gigs with some dialogue. The fact that the game doesn't waste your time with fetch quests (unless you count the burglary gigs) is appreciated, but you end up with this massive, grandiose world rich with atmosphere but poverty stricken in terms of actual content. In most open world games there'll be more side quests than you'll bother doing - not quite the case here, and you can easily complete the main story and all of the side quests in probably 30 hours.

 

The game's brevity is part of why I said to expect a Ubisoft-esque game - what you have here is a quick burn FPS game with a fair number of RPG elements; while it does try to give you an RPG experience, the streamlined, high budget spectacles that much of the quests amount to and the lack of overall content make it at times feel more like a set piece shooter than a meaningful world for you to invest into. Which is not to say I didn't get emotionally invested in the game and its characters - but there's always this feeling that there should be more to the game. In games like Fallout, Skyrim, or Mass Effect, side quests often have meaningful effects on the world - if you go on a loyalty mission in ME2, it'll affect your relationship with a character who'll stay with you for the rest of the game. If you finish a guild questline in Skyrim, you'll have a cool new lair with repeatable quests handed out to you. If you finish a companion's quest in Fallout, that advances their character arc and you'll always have them around to remind you of what you did, and in other cases entire settlements can be destroys based on your actions. In Cyberpunk, you finish a fantastic quest line that introduces a great character you'll emotionally attach to, and then that's it. You don't have companions to travel around with, a cool new hideout, or a meaningful effect on the world. For instance, several questlines end in an opportunity for a love interest, which amounts to a passionate sex scene and then... nothing until the end of the game save for rare text messages that weren't even there in the base game. The one character you do get to spend time with throughout the game is your Keanu Reeves imaginary friend, which didn't thrill me at first as it felt like a further railroading of your character's narrative, but by the end of the game I came to quite enjoy his character.

 

And all that's a shame, because at the core is a fantastic game. Night city is gorgeous. And the gameplay is solid. Weapons feel responsive, melee is not only viable but a hell of a lot of fun, and you have a wide array of game changing perks and implants to invest into - want robot hands to beat the shit out of people and set them on fire with? You got it! Want to hack people to make them shoot themselves, start attacking their allies, or pass out like some fucking suicide magician? Go for it. Want to just shoot people to death? You can do that too, and the guns are fantastic and diverse - I went for melee and heavy weapons, so I missed out on much of the game's options in that regard, but even with that narrow selection the array of shotguns alone was impressive; high tech shotguns with homing bullets, a double barreled shotgun reminiscent of ID games, auto shotguns, et cetera. (Unfortunately, as far as I can tell there's only one type of light machine gun, which was... disappointing. But it feels good to use, at least.) To add to this, level design is outstanding and even for the relatively low investment gigs there are usually multiple ways to get to an objective - you can use strength or technical ability to force open doors, distract enemies away from them, crawl through vents, and so on and so forth. It reminded me of a video about Deus Ex Machina and how its alternate routes kinda sucked - Cyberpunk's do not. The main story missions and (good) side quests are a joy to play through, and even just running around and taking down thugs with your weapon of choice is very satisfying due to how the game's combat feels. (Unless you're going for the platinum and have to spend 10-20 hours just taking down random groups of enemies. Euch.) The biggest problem with the combat is that the game's difficulty is... odd. Early in the game, certain parts of the city were just no fly zones for me because they were filled with enemies that could insta-kill me (with no indicators that these were high level zones), but later in the game every enemy was a triviality. Additionally, while the game's driving was apparently pretty bad at launch, I found the driving fine, and the wide variety of vehicles, each of which feels different, and the breadth of songs on the game's radio stations make even navigating the city a fun experience.

 

All in all, it's a fun game. It's not a masterpiece, and you'll probably come out of it with the sense that it could have been something much more, but if you can rent it or pick it up cheap (and own a PS5, because fuck the PS4 version), it's a solid 8.5/10, though there's an expansion on its way so I would suggest waiting until it releases for the full experience. Personally, I was done with the game by the time I platinumed it, although that's partially because of my 10-20 hour open world cleanup detour - perhaps best to save for after you finish the game so as to not lose track of your place in the story, which is what happened to me.

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Managed to beat all of the base game completion marks in The Binding of Isaac as the Lost, plus Hush and Delirium. After that ordeal, every other character feels easy, even on hard mode. But it's definitely shaken my resolve to 100% the game - I'd rather not cheese it using save scumming, and Tainted Lost's inability to pick up any of the useful defensive items that save the Lost make me question the effects it would have on my sanity. I've heard you can use Tainted Cain to cheese other characters' completion marks though, and two player co-op can also help, so perhaps I'll try those avenues. But I may just leave it at the platinum.

 

177: Destroy All Humans! 2 - 32.53%

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First of all, let me say that this is a good game. Or rather, it has the potential to be one. In a year or two, it'll probably be a very solid 7-7.5/10. Right now, it's a buggy mess that I can't honestly recommend anyone pick up. As is, despite the fact that I rented this game and finished it within a week or so I still feel ripped off.

 

I never played much of Destroy All Humans 2, so unlike with the first game's remake, I can't speak for how close to the original it is - I do know that, at the very least, the maps have been given more contrast and shape and made smaller, and a certain rather problematic mission was removed. Besides that (similarly to the original, I presume) the game is very similar to DAH 1's remake - most of the on foot and saucer weapons overlap with the first game, as do the tools and powers you're given. This isn't really a bad thing - DAH 1 was a fun game, and this game is very much just more of a good thing.

 

Destroy All Humans 2 puts you on Earth ten years after you, a very crude, innuendo-fueled alien named Crypto, took over the US. All is well until the KGB makes an attempt on your life and destroys the alien mothership you have in orbit, leading to you roaming the globe in order to track them down. For the most part, the game's divided into two co-existing halves - you have saucer sections wherein you fight hordes of vehicles, destroy buildings, and the more common ground segments wherein you must torment the denizens of Earth on foot. These are mechanically distinct and feature a Ratchet & Clank-esque loadout of ridiculous weaponry - though admittedly a few of the saucer's weapons are very underpowered, which limits the functional variety, as throwing vehicles at whatever it is you need to destroy ends up being the best solution in most cases. Besides guns, you have a variety of abilities to aid you in whatever it is you're doing at the moment - you can wipe people's memories, take control of their bodies, use telepathy to fling them to god knows where or use them as weapons, and more. Highly destructible environments add to the carnage, with buildings collapsing and vehicles exploding significantly livening up any firefight.

 

Graphically, the game is gorgeous, at least compared to its predecessor. It's easy to see why the game is a PS5 exclusive; vibrant, busy environments in a (usually, anyway) smooth 60 fps had me frequently stopping to take in the sights. The effects of your weapons are satisfying, as is the previously mentioned destruction. If any game ever deserved the title of remake, it'd be this one.

 

The missions themselves are fairly varied - main story missions typically have you infiltrating complexes, blasting your way through set pieces, and occasionally shooting the shit out of an unsuspecting city. These story missions take you through five different locations across the globe, each of which is distinct and memorable. On top of this, you have an abundance of side quests, which are far more hit or miss - while having a large amount of side content is good, DAH2's side quests often end up being a mix and match of a few basic elements - talking to people, going from point A to point B, disguising yourself, escorting people, and taking out certain targets. They get... repetitive, to say the least. The good thing is that they're entirely optional, and so you're allowed to pursue them very much at your own leisure - unless you're going for the platinum, in which case, buckle the fuck up. While the main missions typically have enough variety and pizazz to keep themselves interesting, the side content is when you'll most be feeling that you're playing a PS2 game.

 

And last, but not least, comes the humor of DAH 2. It's... crude, to say the least. DAH 1 was crude, but DAH 2 takes it to the next level - many of the game's missions have you interacting with a very picturesque representation of the 'sexy Russian spy' trope, and most of these interactions include Crypto talking about how much he wants to bone her at least once. When it lands, it lands well, and synergizes well with the chaotic moment to moment gameplay of the game. When it doesn't, you have an awkward mishmash of an extremely horny ET and racial stereotypes I'd thought we'd left behind at the turn of the millennium. Which isn't to say it's terribly offensive, or anything of the sort - but at times I had to groan through dialogue which felt like I was watching an edgy teenager's first Newgrounds contribution.

 

All in all, it's a fun, chaotic romp through a gorgeous world with more than enough content to satisfy. It still plays as a PS2 game at times, particularly with awkward, drawn out mission design, but this has its advantages - the absurd storyline and chaos of the saucer sections have a charm to them you don't see in many of the safe, polished-to-a-fault AAA games of today. This is where I would give you a wholehearted recommendation to buy it (perhaps at a gentle discount)...

 

If not for the bugs.

To avoid ranting for several paragraphs about what an absolute mess this game is, I will simply try to list out all the issues I had with it, for my sanity and yours.

  1. Memory leaks leading to increasingly unplayable frame rates and eventual crashes, usually when exploring a lot of the map (for instance, while collectible hunting.)
  2. Random screen tearing, especially during saucer sections.
  3. Items being held by PK getting stuck on objects and level geometry, even ones like poles that they'd realistically slip past.
  4. Vehicles held by PK withdrawing consent and deciding to simply sit in the air when you try to throw them.
  5. Voice lines originating from parts of the map instead of characters, resulting in being able to walk away from your own character talking.
  6. Crashes. Crashes. Crashes.
  7. Cutscenes that should have sound effects either not having them play at all or having them play nowhere near where they're supposed to - oddly not a problem with dialogue.
  8. Extremely janky hitbox on the free love ability, with enemies right in front of you, clearly in its beam, not being affected by it.
  9. Voice lines during cut scenes sometimes repeating the first sentence, resulting in a significant portion of dialogue being cut off due to an early transition to the next line.
  10. Characters during escort missions deciding to get intimately acquainted with a wall, fence, or small object in their path instead of going where they're supposed to go.
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178: Landflix Odyssey - 22.50%

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Landflix Odyssey is a budget indie platformer wherein you play as some guy with a beer belly who watches a lot of TV, who is sucked into his television and must traverse through five very blatant parodies of popular streaming shows, in particular Stranger Things, Game of Thrones, Daredevil, Breaking Bad, and the Walking Dead... Yeah, one of those stands out a little. If the concept sounds silly, that's because it is, as is pretty much all of the game itself - it's a silly platformer that takes you through a bunch of streaming show themed worlds, each with unique gimmicks and abilities for the protagonist to use.

 

The main thing Landflix Odyssey has going for it is its gimmick, namely the five colorful worlds it takes you through, interspersed with some unique (but... clunky) vehicle sections. The gameplay is fairly standard fare - you have your typical run and jump gameplay combined with a burp that can stun enemies, and an ability unique to every world to complement in, save for world 1, unless you count the stealth sections. These vary in how well done they are - I found the Daredevil nunchuck grapple hook thing to be a pain in the ass, and puzzles with it even moreso, but other gimmicks such as the Walking Dead crossbow, which allows you to climb up walls by firing arrows into them, or Heisenberg er, Ice$Berg's drugs which slow down time. It's an entertaining enough romp. There's some dialogue and story to the game, but it's largely irrelevant - there's some story regarding magic batteries and an evil twin of a scientist or something of the sort, but this scientist only appears in the beginning and ending cutscenes, rendering him somewhat inert an antagonist.

 

Now, I say it's an entertaining enough romp - but that comes with a major caveat. Were this an easy game, I'd recommend it wholeheartedly. However, this game makes the fatal mistake of attempting to be a precision platformer, when there is nothing precise about it. An easy game that struggles in the gameplay department can be given a pass, because you won't have to struggle against it too much - but a hard game with bad gameplay is an extremely frustrating experience, because you're repeatedly forced to butt heads with the game's flaws. And that's the problem here. The game is littered with design flaws. A certain type of ninja has an attack where he dashes forwards and then back, dealing damage if you're in his way. Easy enough to remedy, except every single instance of these otherwise identical ninjas has a different attack range. Some of them are so short you barely need to back up a few steps to avoid them. Others require you to flee. Ceiling and wall crusher traps have absurd hitboxes, where even touching the flat side of them kills you instantly. The game's difficulty fluctuates wildly, sometimes giving you checkpoints every screen despite little to no challenge, while others will go three or four screens with extremely convoluted puzzles you have to repeat every single time. Boss fights are... there. The first world's final boss fight involves running through identical (but somewhat sped up) gauntlets three times in a row, with no checkpoints, and pulling a lever every time. Another involves jumping over rapidly moving instakill mine carts. And that's to say nothing of how often the game likes to send you plummeting to your death by spamming projectiles over bottomless pits or other kinds of traps. I could go on. But I won't.

 

All of which is a shame, because when this game is fun, it's fun. It's an interesting idea and it has some good mechanics to it. But too much of my play time was spent frustrated and asking myself, "why am I doing this?" for me to be able to wholeheartedly recommend this game. If you don't mind frustrating platformers as much as I do (I don't care too much for the genre as a whole, which no doubt doesn't help) you may find a quirky little platformer here. But I would recommend you look elsewhere, as there's no shortage of charming indie platformers on Playstation, and many of them are much less frustrating experiences.

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I've noticed the last few months that having my ADHD medicated not only seems to make me actually able to focus on longer games (hence the recent uptick in my collection of UR plats), but actually seems to make me have trouble playing shorter games. Whereas previously I would usually be juggling 3-4 short games and have 1 or 2 longer platinums I'd play off and on in the background, these days I just end up fixating on one long game and playing it non stop to completion, and it's harder for me to motivate myself to play shorter games because they feel less rewarding. Which is funny, because that's the exact opposite of the problem I had before.

 

Going to try to take a swing at more games that won't take me a month each to platinum, though, because I'd still like to hit my goal of 200 platinums by 2023. Or at least get into the 190s.

 

179: The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth - 2.75%

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It feels like I've been playing the Binding of Isaac for a decade now, a feeling only tangentially related to the fact that I have indeed been playing it for a decade. When the original flash game came out, I was just entering my teens and was delighted by its crude humor and randomized gameplay. The game was brutal - I don't think I ever actually beat it until several years later, when I discovered the joy of Cain, who was about as much of an overpowered piece of shit as you could hope for in flash Isaac. Since then, I've played the game on and off in its various incarnations - I racked up several hundred hours on the 3DS version of the game, which unfortunately did not receive any expansions, then once I had a PS4 I tried the game again, this time with the Afterbirth and Afterbirth+ expansions, which both massively revamped the game. And finally, I picked the game up again over a month and a half ago along with its final expansion, Repentance, a very fitting last bow for what is, in my opinion, the definitive roguelike. Repentance adds nineteen new characters - two new base characters, and tainted forms for every character which each have massively divergent gameplay styles. It also fixes up the game's difficulty, restoring some of the brutality of flash Isaac that had been lost with the multitudes of game breaks and cheese strategies that had become the norm in Afterbirth and Afterbirth+.

 

I said that the Binding of Isaac is the definitive roguelike, and I meant it. I regularly partake of the genre, and tend to greatly enjoy most roguelikes I play. But one problem I have with almost every roguelike is that after a dozen hours or so, you feel like you've experienced everything in the game. Room patterns become familiar to the point of memorization, you've collected every item in the game and defeated every boss, and so on, and so forth. Even higher budget games like Returnal (which I've complained about at length previously in the thread) fall into this trap. The fact of the matter is that it takes a shit ton of content to make a game that consists of a random selection of rooms and bosses feel fresh. The Binding of Isaac is perhaps the best roguelike in this regard, simply because it's been around so long and had so much added to it. If you count the large number of new content added in Rebirth, The Binding of Isaac has had five expansions in its lifetime, each adding large swaths of content and vastly altering the game. Between having over 900 items, many of which entirely change your playstyle, 34 characters, multiple variations of every floor, branching paths (including an alternative path that entirely replaces the base game path if chosen), there's just so much going on that it takes hundreds of hours to even begin at exhausting the game's supply of content. I doubt there'll ever be another roguelike as expansive as The Binding of Isaac is - there certainly isn't right now, at any rate.

 

At its core - and particularly in the original flash game - the Binding of Isaac may seem like something of a vanilla roguelike. There's no fancy gimmicks - you've got your item room, your store, bombs to open up secret rooms, bosses, and a fairly underwhelming tear attack. The beauty of Isaac is how massively it scales up - from these humble beginnings, you'll continue to amass power until you end up with completely broken builds; massive tears fired so rapidly that you can't even see the screen, barrages consisting of seven homing lasers fired simultaneously, infinite armies of spiders and flies doing your bidding... and the list goes on. This is something which, while not unique to Isaac, is certainly rare - on top of the usual repetitiveness that comes with simply not having enough content, most roguelikes play it safe with their powerups. You'll get a damage up here, a defense upgrade there, but for the most part roguelikes tend to feel more or less the same from beginning to end. Perhaps you switch your sword for an axe, but you're still hitting enemies with sharp objects. This isn't true of Isaac. The game not only offers you the opportunity to develop absurdly overpowered builds, it demands it for the late game bosses. Perhaps one of Isaac's strongest features is that it truly does allow every run to feel unique, especially with Repentance's addition of a shit ton of synergies to the game, allowing previously incompatible attack modifiers to combine. Whereas once you would have to choose between the burst fire of Monstro's Lung or the laser tears of Technology, now you'll fire a gorgeous laser barrage which I can only compare to lightning. There are so many of these types of items and item combinations, too - synergies that entirely change how your character plays which you'll only see once or twice in hundreds of hours.

 

The game's... atmosphere? theme? is also one of its unique aspects. The game is a crude one. Teenaged me gleefully ate up the references to Satanism and the hordes of deformed abominations you had to fight in the Binding of Isaac, and I'm not sure if I would enjoy its atmosphere nearly as much as I do now if I were new to the series. The game starts with a rather shoddy cutscene featuring Isaac's mother snapping and attacking Isaac, and Isaac narrowly escaping by jumping into the basement. For years, this was all the story the game offered to accompany your journey through basements filled with fleshy monstrosities that range from deformed children to creatures which have almost no resemblance to humans at all, alongside a host of spiders, flies, and so on, and so forth. The game is crude and frankly, gross - levels are filled with poop, and later levels literally take place inside wombs or corpses. Items are similarly edgy, ranging from parts of dead pets to diseases. One new item added in Repentance has a giant spider living inside your mutilated face. Initially this was just edginess for the sake of edginess, as is the norm with Edmund's games, but interestingly, over the expansions the game's developed an actual story to it, taking the meaningless violence of flash Isaac and weaving it into a narrative of abuse, suicide, and neglect. All this is rendered in a crisp pixelated style which captures the crudeness of the flash game while also rendering it quite a bit more dignified, and a fantastic soundtrack that captures the game's intensity and despair.

 

Of course, the game's not without its annoyances - some of the challenges are absolute hell to wade through, for instance; while you could simply skip most of them if you weren't a trophy hunter, every additional DLC has added a swath of new challenges which the base game challenge trophy requires completion of, and they vary greatly in quality. Angel rooms and devil rooms - rooms containing powerful items which typically require you to go a floor without taking red heart damage - have been made more rare, and some previously game breaking items have been nerfed to the point of being in many cases useless. Some of the bosses added since the base game are brutal, too, especially if encountered in the first floor before you've gotten any damage ups. But all in all, I really have to look for things to complain about, which is a rarity for me. But I'm hardly an impartial observer, as you may have guessed from the rest of this wall of text.

 

I think I've sung its praises enough for the time being. Needless to say, the game gets a glowing recommendation from me - if you like indie roguelikes, there's a very high chance you'll like the Binding of Isaac. Unfortunately, the game almost never receives sales, and as such unless you intend to buy the PS4 version piece by piece, you'll need to shell out 60$ for the game and all its DLC. But for 11 years of content and one of the best (if not the best) roguelikes on the market, it's not an altogether unreasonable price. I've certainly gotten my money's worth.

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180: Wolfenstein Youngblood - 13.06%

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Wolfenstein Youngblood is a strange game. The three main games comprising the Wolfenstein reboot are all fantastic examples of the FPS genre. Then there's Youngblood and Cyberpilot, two spinoff games that both feel... half baked. Wolfenstein Youngblood is an attempt at making a co-op Wolfenstein - you play as two teenage sisters looking for their father, B.J. Blazkowicz, armed with two power suits, unholy arsenal, and teen spirit.

 

At its core, Wolfenstein Youngblood is a good game. The weapons are fun to use and there's a lot of them, your characters have an array of powers to upgrade, most of which are pretty significant (unlike the Wolfenstein skill trees, which I recall being rather unnecessary), and combat is fun. The problem is that Youngblood has a sturdy foundation and only half a house. Between the free roam levels, daily and weekly challenges, and obscene amount of unlocks, Youngblood clearly wants to be a live service, Destiny type game, but it lacks the content to actually hold the appeal of one. There are, if I recall correctly, six main story missions you can replay, and most of them take place in the free roam areas, as do all of the game's side quests. The combat is solid, despite the oddly out of place tankiness of the enemies, and the game is fun, it just doesn't really give you enough to hold your interest for as long as it expects to have it. Co-op is fairly well implemented, too - characters talk to each other constantly (perhaps too much), comment on each others' actions, and can use buffs to heal each other, restore each other's ammo, amplify damage, etc. If you have a partner willing to endure the platinum grind with you (mine, sadly, was not), the game's a decent enough diversion for the few dozen hours it'll take you to platinum it.

 

The game's littered with little oddities - the story's main characters are all teenage girls, which would make a charming coming of age story (or whatever the fuck) if not for the fact that half the gleeful commentary doled out relates to slaughtering Nazis. The game stands in stark contrast to the mainline Wolfenstein games - where BJ is a towering goliath composed entirely of muscle and PTSD, his daughters have neither the attitudes or appearances of people who've slaughtered Nazis by the hundreds. This might work in a game that took itself less seriously, but everything about the game besides its characters mirrors the dark alternate history of the mainline games, and so what we get is just odd. Besides that, the story isn't particularly worth commenting on - it serves its purpose, however due to the brevity of the main game it's hardly there and primarily serves as a backdrop to the free roam activities that comprise most of the game.

 

The weapon selection, too, makes me think the game was rushed or unfinished - your weapons consist of two types of pistol, a sub machine gun, an assault rifle, and an automatic shotgun. And then seven heavy weapons. There's no classic shotgun or sniper rifle, but you've got two laser cannons and two (sort of) grenade launchers. What weapons are there are well implemented, and have sets of upgrades which can considerably change how they function. But the choice of weapons is so bizarre I can't imagine it was intended. What other game has heavy weapons - usually the pinnacle of one's arsenal reserved for one or two slots - make up the majority of the game's weapons? It's incredibly out of place, especially in a game where mobility is so important - one of the characters thrives on charging into enemies, and double jump platforming is a common occurrence.

 

But shooting Nazis is fun, and shooting Nazis with a friend is even more fun. If you liked Wolfenstein's combat, can handle a bit of a grind, and have a willing sacrifice willing to play the game with you (purchasing the game allows another person to play with you for free via the trial version, albeit with no trophies), you'll probably find the game to be a decent enough game. A solid seven out of ten, I'd say. The final grind once you've completed all the missions is, however, rather mind numbing, so I recommend finding a TV show or podcast to binge while doing it - I've been occupying myself with Preacher, personally.

 

Maybe now I'll finally have the motivation I need to go back to the other Wolfensteins and platinum them, as I'd intended to do years ago. (Thank you, ADHD.) Not Wolfenstein 2, though. That platinum trophy can rot in hell.

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33 minutes ago, Darling Baphomet said:

If you have a partner willing to endure the platinum grind with you (mine, sadly, was not)

My best friend made me buy this game during COVID to do co-op and now they won't play it anymore. It's been stuck on my backlog for 2 years and all I've heard that this game is shit. Good to know there is something there to enjoy.

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34 minutes ago, boorish_brute said:

My best friend made me buy this game during COVID to do co-op and now they won't play it anymore. It's been stuck on my backlog for 2 years and all I've heard that this game is shit. Good to know there is something there to enjoy.

 

Ah shit, that sucks. Yeah, mine petered out right after completing the first Brother mission (basically one of three raids that gives you one of the weapons that can open doors), so I had to play most of it alone. It's fun enough, just repetitive, but I like having some repetitive games I can play while watching TV shows, so it works out for me.

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181: Pistol Whip - 8.15%

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Pistol Whip has the tendency to be referred to as Beat Saber meats John Wick, and... well, judging from the platinum trophy image, which is not subtle, it's safe to say that's intended. Pistol Whip is a rhythm game that hands you a gun - or two - and unleashes you into a variety of on-rails levels filled with enemies, most of whom have guns and will be using them. Gameplay consists of shooting your enemies, pistol whipping them, frantically dodging bullets and obstacles, and very satisfyingly swinging your gun downwards to reload. The game also gives you additional points for hitting targets precisely (although it has very potent auto-aim, so you never have to worry too much about missing) and shooting to the rhythm, adding a layer of replayability, as there's nothing quite as satisfying as seeing chains of bright red "200"s pop up and knowing you're entirely in tune with the music.

 

Immediately, the game has a few advantages of Beat Saber - the 'targets' are far more interesting, as are the levels, making you feel like you're in an action movie as opposed to the neon void of Beat Saber. The obstacles and constant stream of bullets encourage you to move around and dodge far more than Beat Saber, which has no penalty for remaining in its penalty boxes other than resetting your multiplier. In Pistol Whip, you can take only two hits, and the second of those kills you. You restore your shield by landing enough shots on enemies, or pistol whipping an opponent. On hard maps especially, this leads to levels being a frenzy of dodging, shooting, and punching. Beat Saber requests a few side steps and squats from you, while Pistol Whip demands them. It's a chaotic, rhythmic romp that makes for an excellent workout game and is likely to make you feel more badass than anything else you've played to date. And it's just fun. Slap on the dual wielding modifier, and you have some of the best VR experiences I've had to date.

 

Seeing me sing Pistol Whip's praises for the last paragraph would make you assume this game is superior to Beat Saber in every way, but that's not entirely accurate. For one thing, Pistol Whip is very hazy. The game tries to make an aesthetic out of this, by having the low poly levels and enemies distort and twist, giving everything a glitchy feel, but it is nonetheless a very ugly game. Neon void or not, Beat Saber's graphics are clean. And more importantly, the game does not have nearly as much content, unfortunately. The developers have been more than generous with post launch content, adding two whole campaigns (as opposed to the individual, disconnected levels the game launched with), one of which is made up of my favorite levels in the game - Smoke & Thunder puts you in the shoes of a dual wielding cow girl and has you partaking in Western shootouts to some of the best music in the game. The other campaign, 2089, adds a satisfying burst fire gun and introduces robot enemies as well as a final boss. There's a clear escalation of quality and scope with the new additions, and it only makes me crave DLC or a sequel even more. This isn't to say the game is painfully short, or underwhelming, because it isn't - by VR standards, it has quite a bit of content, much more so than the typical 3-4 hour gimmick title. If you're trying to make a regular workout routine out of VR gaming, you'll have to return to Beat Saber or some other content rich game eventually - but you won't want to.

 

All in all, it's a great game. It's worth 30$, and it's most certainly worth the 15$ it frequently drops to. It's worth noting that it's also going to have a free PSVR2 update, so if you're planning to buy a PSVR2, it may be worth waiting for that. While the PSVR1 version mostly ran flawlessly, there were nonetheless some hiccups - trying to line up a shot at an enemy in front of you interferes with your headset tracking, for instance. For a high octane game such as this, the presumably superior tracking of PSVR2 will be a godsend. But the PSVR1 version runs fantastically, and these are minor hiccups.

 

(Also, once again, try the dual wielding modifier. It's fantastic. Especially with the revolvers. You won't be able to earn some trophies while using modifiers, but those are easily knocked out, leaving you to your own devices.)

Edited by Darling Baphomet
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182: Doom 3 - 4.65%

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Doom 3 sits in an awkward position in the franchise. Coming before it are Doom and Doom 2, both classic examples of arcade FPS games. And proceeding it you have the Doom reboot and Doom Eternal, which are a return to the breakneck action of the original Doom games, and even surpass them. Doom 3, on the other hand, is a slow and atmospheric horror FPS game that displays prominent influences from Half-Life.

 

I never personally got to playing the old Doom games - 2016 Doom was my first. And having grown up hearing about how it was too dark, I did not feel particularly inspired to play it until recently. I can't wholly comment on that darkness, as the re-releases of Doom 3 implemented significant gameplay changes, namely a toggleable flashlight you can use alongside your guns, no longer making you choose between light or self-defense. Perhaps it lost some of its identity with these changes, however, as even after trying to make itself more typical an FPS, you can still tell that it is not one.

 

Gameplay wise, Doom 3 is a fairly standard FPS game. You have your useless pistol, your even more useless fists, an assault rifle, grenades, shotgun, gatling gun, plasma rifle, rocket launcher, and finally the BFG. The iconic super shotgun which has been in almost every Doom and Quake game is surprisingly absent, only becoming available during the DLC. It's a solid, albeit somewhat lacking arsenal compared to other ID games. The main feature to distinguish Doom 3 is its atmosphere - many levels, particularly in the base campaign, are extremely dark; enemies lurk behind every other door and often walls will come down as you pass them to reveal enemies waiting for you. Throughout the game, there's multiple scripted horror moments where you encounter poltergeists, hear ghosts, or have your vision turn blood red as you hallucinate. All this combines for a cautious, tense crawl through the various facilities in the UAC Mars base as you attempt to stop an increasingly dire demonic invasion. The story takes a back seat to the gameplay, but what is there is more than enough to support the game. It's littered with voice logs and e-mails, as games often are, although being unable to pause to check them made me tend to neglect them, as opening your PDA exposes you to danger. The DLC is for the most part an improvement on the base game, offering new enemy varieties, the return of the super shotgun, and a proto-gravity gun type weapon. They build upon the base game and successfully improve upon its formula and are highly worthy additions to the game.

 

It's hard to really say too much more about Doom 3 - all in all it's a solid, if somewhat aged, FPS. It's unlikely to blow your mind in 2022, but if you tend to sympathize with boomer shooters, you may enjoy it nonetheless. It's a tight, enjoyable experience... on every difficulty except nightmare. And if you want to platinum this game, you will be playing a lot of nightmare.

 

So, where do I begin? On nightmare difficulty, your health constantly ticks down to 25. You can retain armor as usual, but this isn't much help in the long run as armor only reduces damage taken by 30% as opposed to blocking it, and thus does nothing to prevent the vast majority of enemies being able to do more than 25 damage to you in one hit. Health packs are removed, and your only sources of healing are health stations and the soul cube, which can kill an enemy to restore you to full health and recharges after five kills. On paper, this sounds like a reasonable enough challenge, however, this is where Doom 3's horror aspirations clash with its FPS gameplay. I've said before that unfair and unfun game mechanics can be rendered unobtrusive if a game is easy, but are often massively exacerbated in a hard game. There is probably no better example of this than Doom 3. This game loves to spawn enemies directly behind doors (which only open when you get close enough, e.g. in one hit kill range), hide enemies behind seemingly normal walls, and spawn enemies behind you with little to no audible indication. This is not a 'happens a few times in the game' situation, either - these are mechanics the game relies on throughout its runtime. What this means is that unless you're spamming saves, every time you walk through a hall way, open a door, or even just... do literally anything, in the case of ambushes from behind, you run the risk of losing 5-10 minutes of progress. The game incentivizes save spamming perhaps moreso than any other game I've played. It's not just efficient, it's a necessity, because the only alternative is memorizing each and every enemy spawn. Even when I knew exactly where enemies would be, I'd still die because of the trickiness of inching next to a door at just the right angle that you don't immediately get killed by a demon pouncing at you. On the bright side, with save spamming, the game is very manageable, and if you're playing on PS5, the load times aren't an issue at all. So there's that.

 

With the usual griping out of the way, Doom 3 is nonetheless a solid FPS game, and an important entry in the history of a genre, if one that shows its age through its sometimes questionable game mechanics. I would wholeheartedly recommend anyone play through it on marine or veteran, but nightmare is definitely a test of any trophy hunter's patience.

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Oops, meant to write this sooner but haven't gotten around to it, clearly.

 

183: Necromunda: Hired Gun - 13.06%

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Necromunda: Hired Gun is basically the opposite of my last platinum, Doom 3. While Doom 3 is a slow paced, corridor crawling horror FPS, Hired Gun is more akin to a Doom Eternal clone, with all the chaos you could want, and more.

 

This game's... a lot. Doom Eternal was a lot, but Hired Gun is even more so in many ways. The first thing I noticed was that the FOV is very high for a console game. The default, and the lowest the FOV slider can go, is 78 vertical FOV which is equivalent to 110 horizontal (what most games use) FOV on a 16:9 monitor. And the game's fast. Very fast. You'll be air dashing, wall running, and grappling your way through arenas as your health is constantly melting, restoring only from dealing damage to your enemies. In that sense, the game is somewhat similar to Doom Eternal, although it's simplified, which I prefer - while the scavenging aspect was fun, it was a bit annoying having to constantly switch weapons, and Hired Gun manages to achieve a similar pacing due to health concerns without that restriction. Glory kills are also present and are all very rapid things which do not take away from gameplay. Perhaps the most extreme element of this game, though, is the environments, and more specifically their scale. Just about every level in the game surrounds you with colossal architecture, whether it's machinery, buildings, or a scrapyard the size of a small suburb. One level has you hop onto a moving train, only the train is several orders of magnitude larger than any real life equivalent. Every level has this sense of grandiosity to it as a result, and even with their scale, they're all highly detailed and gorgeous to look at.

 

The gameplay is fairly standard for a Doom Eternal-like. As mentioned before, you've got your guns - all of which feel fantastic to use and look great, and can be customized extensively - your glory kills, your traversal options including wall running (during which you gain auto aim), and your grapple hook. And on top of that, you get a dog companion who can be summoned temporarily on a cooldown and mauls your enemies to death, and who can be upgraded, progressively becoming more and more of a cybernetic monstrosity in the process. But the icing in the cake is your powers - as you upgrade your cybernetics you upgrade a wide variety of them, and they range from buffs such as auto-aim and slowing down time to attacks, like dashing up to an enemy and unleashing an explosive punch. The combat would be good without these, but with them, it's great. The enemy variety is fairly decent too - you've got goliaths, psychics, gunmen, mechs, gene stealers, and more. I'm honestly not sure how many there are all in all because in the heat of battle it sometimes becomes difficult to distinguish them from one another (save for the goliaths and mechs which are far too large to be mistaken for anything else), but they do enough to keep the battles interesting. There's also boss enemies who are... okay? But for the most part are just dangerous bullet sponges.

 

Necromunda: Hired Gun is also a looter shooter. Kind of. It's a very strange implementation of the concept. You don't have any sort of inventory inside of missions, just a permanently empty weapon slot you can equip a gun you find during a mission in, and the rest can only be accessed once you finish the mission, at which point you can assign them to your (rather limited) inventory or sell them. The game's looter shooters aren't that pronounced, either - the guns you pick up are all more or less the same for every variety, except some are higher rarity and thus do slightly more damage, and their attachments are random. You can pick up archeotech and equip it to your weapons to add elemental damage, but that's its own thing and not an aspect of the guns, so by the end game picking up loot, and especially guns, starts to feel kind of meaningless. On the bright side, there is a wide variety of weaponry - you have sawed off shotguns, multiple regular shotguns, bolters, sniper rifles, revolvers, plasma pistols, a weird ass fucking gravgun that creates explosive singularities when enemies die from it, and more. All of the guns feel satisfying to use due to being very responsive and having great sound effects, although they aren't balanced perfectly and as such performance wise some of them can be underwhelming. All in all, the looter shooter elements are enough to keep you engaged with picking up loot for much of the game, but lack the depth to really be of much interest beyond that purpose.

 

The main campaign of the game isn't exceedingly long, consisting of thirteen missions, though they are for the most part long ones. Besides this, you get side missions, which are most akin to open world activities, minus the open world. You'll be put in a cut off section of one of the story missions and given various objectives - destroy fans, harvest corpses, kill powerful enemies, capture points, or defend an area alongside AI companions. They're fun diversions and award you with money to spend on upgrades, guns, or gun components, but they aren't something you'll want to keep coming back to endlessly. I would estimate my platinum took me ~15 hours or so, which for 16$ was more than enough to keep me satisfied.

 

And now for the issues. I'd heard that this game was an absolute mess at launch, but apparently it received a massive visual overhaul and quite a few patches - I can, at the very least, say that it looks gorgeous in its current state and is very worthy of being a PS5 game. But the game is still unfortunately rather buggy. I experienced several crashes during my playthrough, including one where my PS5 said the save data was corrupted, except I was able to resume as normal. I also got stuck in terrain a few times, however only once did this require abandoning the mission I was in. It also has the rare frame drops in certain areas, which aren't enough to really be a nuisance but are noticeable regardless. It's a game by a smaller studio, so some jank is expected, I suppose.

 

One of the game's biggest failings, IMO is in its sound. Not the actual sound effects (although enemies repeating voice lines can be annoying), but rather its music. For most of the game, you'll be hearing vague ambient music which just doesn't mesh all that well with heated firefights. On occasion, during a big fight, you'll get some worthy music playing, but it fades into nothingness all too soon, and then it's back to creepy ambience punctuated by gunfire and yelling. Now, not every game has to have a kickass soundtrack, but the music was one of Doom Eternal's best aspects, and it is a shame for a game that clearly draws so much inspiration from it to miss the mark in that regard. (Shadow Warrior 3 had a similar issue - it had fantastic music, however it's so quiet even at max volume that it's nearly inaudible.)

 

All in all, a solid game. I'd been scared off by mixed reviews for years, and perhaps it's just been patched that well, but I really have to sing the praises of this game. It was a blast to play through and more than anything I just wish there was more of it. At a good 50% discount (or better), I can recommend this game wholeheartedly to anyone who likes FPS games. And owns a PS5, as I don't know how this game runs on a PS4, but I can't imagine it's great.

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184: Crysis 2 Remastered - 30.21%

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My third FPS platinum in a row - I'm on a bit of a roll, and if all goes well, I should make that four with Crysis 3. If you've been keeping up with this thread, you probably saw my rather harsh review of Crysis 1. Crysis 2 is not Crysis 1, and good lord, am I happy for it. Crysis 2 almost seems like a soft reboot of the series - nanosuits now run on alien technology, the aliens themselves are completely different from their Crysis 1 counterparts, and there are few returning characters from 1.

 

Like Crysis 1, Crysis 2 is a realistic shooter where you are a voiceless soldier equipped with a super suit that grants you numerous abilities. Functionally, this means you can go invisible and activate a mode that reduces damage taken. You also have 'super strength' and 'super speed', but these aren't modes you toggle so much as the ability to sprint and to throw objects, neither of which are nearly as impressive. What this leads to is a game that favors hit and run tactics - sneak around in stealth, let your energy recharge, then turn on armor and wreak havoc before returning to stealth. For a cover shooter, it's highly engaging, and this is aided by all the weapons feeling good to use (if not always that powerful). Unlike the wide, open maps of Crysis 1 which gave me such treasured memories as being sniped by enemies which were so far away they weren't even rendered, Crysis 2 is a fairly linear romp through a ravaged New York City. The change in map design does wonders to alleviate most of my issues with 1, and delivers a fantastic FPS campaign.

 

The gameplay of the campaign consists of fighting a private mercenary group in charge of controlling an alien plague (CELL), and the aliens responsible for said plague. Human combat is solid, and human enemies are fun to engage with. While they're all essentially the same save for the rare sniper, they also bring vehicles which in some levels serve as bosses. The aliens are now bipeds that come in a few forms - grunts, melee attackers, medium grunts, heavies, and their tough as nails gunships and tanks. One of the common complaints about Crysis 1 was that the aliens just weren't fun to fight - and they were not! Crysis 2's redesign, however, makes them much more engaging and varied, and instead of being a gimmick near the end of the game, they're a staple, and as fun to fight as the human enemies are. You also get to control vehicles on a few times, however unlike in 1 the vehicle sections are mostly optional, with only one or two sections where you're driving alongside NPCs.

 

The story is... well, it's a lot better than 1's. It's fairly standard fare for an FPS campaign and largely serves as a means to transition you between set pieces and fights, but what is there is competent and a hell of a lot more cohesive than that of Crysis 1 - it's no longer just an excuse to fight aliens on an island, but instead an interesting story in its own right. You play as a marine who was attacked on his way to New York, only to be rescued by Prophet and given his nanosuit, and set off to help a conspiracy theorist / scientist figure out the weaknesses of the alien menace currently devastating New York. It's hardly a character driven story, but the characters that are there are colorful and memorable and a massive improvement over having faceless sergeants barking orders into your ears. There's a plague running through the city, and you'll find people seemingly melting every now and then, but you've come to the city in the late stages of the disease - it's already ravaged the city, so you'll be running through streets deserted by all but soldiers and aliens. As you progress the story, more and more of New York gets destroyed, often spectacularly - skyscrapers collapsing, dams being destroyed. It's an explosive campaign and at no point does it feel mediocre or underwhelming. And at eighteen levels (which may sound shorter than it is), it's more than long enough to keep you occupied and fit in a twist or two. All in all, probably one of the top ten FPS campaigns I've played. Disappointingly, the game doesn't actually have a final boss - but I still prefer that to the godawful boss of Crysis 1's campaign, and the final level was more than ~epic~ enough to make up for it.

 

Speaking of spectacles, the graphics are impressive. I'm not sure how much of this is the remaster, but the game looks better than most PS4 games (unsurprising, since it's 60 fps and averages 1440p). Character models definitely show their age when you get up close to them, but the levels are gorgeous, in large part due to how much effort is put into them. Streets are littered with garbage and rubble, god rays shine through windows, foliage is lush and detailed, and weather effects are heavy. The game is beautiful. The sound department is similarly impressive - guns sound good which contributes heavily to how responsive they feel, and the music is great; several areas have loud, droning industrial(?) music setting the pace to your fights, a stark contrast to the silence of my last platinum, Necromunda Hired Gun.

 

What else to say? The platinum journey was fun - not too many collectibles to worry about, just a few combat trophies and level specific challenges. Supersoldier difficulty would theoretically be hard, as you die near instantly, however by decloaking (or switching to armor mode) before firing, you can essentially break the game. Normally, firing while cloaked drains your energy bar, committing you to combat, however no such thing happens if you disable cloak first. You can also simply... run past most encounters, especially if you upgraded the appropriate modules during your first playthrough. I experienced a few crashes during my first session of the game, but oddly enough those didn't occur again. The HDR settings are also a bit wack, so I recommend checking out the related thread in the game's subforum for advice on how to calibrate them. The controls are actually great, unlike Crysis 1's, which I do not recall clearly, but did describe as trying to aim with an Etch-A-Sketch, and I will trust my past self with that description.

 

All in all, an extremely solid FPS that'll stay in my memory. Crysis 1 felt like a relic - interesting, but out of place in modern times. Crysis 2, on the other hand, aged like wine (doubtlessly assisted by improvements in the remaster). It's a fantastic game and I highly recommend it to anyone with a tendency to shoot things who is the least bit curious.

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185: Crysis 3 Remastered - 28.97%

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... And that makes four!

Crysis 3 is like the strange bastard child of Crysis 1 and 2, though that's not to say it doesn't improve on its predecessors - guns feel better than ever, the new predator bow (a bow that one hits most enemies and can be used during stealth without decloaking) feels great, the aliens are more fun to fight than in either of the previous games, and the now overgrown New York City looks great - but there's a lot of odd decisions that drag it down compared to two. Crysis 1 had wide, open maps set on an island where everybody is Deadshot (and no, I will never stop bitching about that), while on the other hand, Crysis 2 opted for a much more linear experience, having you run through New York City and offering a much more tight gameplay experience overall. Crysis 3 takes the middle ground - levels are at times linear, and at other times very open, although often less so than Crysis 1's were. This more or less works, however it does not give as tight feeling a campaign as Crysis 2 does, and they evidently had to sacrifice to achieve it, as the game only features 8 levels. Each level also looks completely different, which, while not a bad thing per se, leads to less of a feeling of continuity between levels like in Crysis 2.

 

The campaign is also odd in one other regard, and perhaps to the greatest degree - its story. You'll recall that I said that Crysis 2's story took a backseat to its gameplay; Crysis 3 is hardly a telltale game, but much more emphasis is put on the characters' emotional angst and cutscenes, many of which involve walking through hallways while listening to Psycho tell you about how scarred he is. And I sympathize - you have trauma, I get it! It's just that your trauma is badly written and you're a two dimensional character and I'd really prefer to be shooting aliens right now. Now, admittedly, Crysis 2 had a few sections where you were following an NPC around doing things that did not involve cybernetic violence, but perhaps the difference lies in that those sections came with several levels of almost pure gameplay in between them, and few scenes took away your agency. Crysis 1 and 2 were never story heavy games - you had classic silent protagonists both of whose interactions with other characters primarily consisted of having orders barked at them. The stories were nothing groundbreaking, but they worked, because they were side dressing. Crysis 3 tries to make the story a main feature, but it has neither the writing quality nor time to really make you care about its story.

 

For instance, there's this woman who is Psycho's commanding officer and also his partner who is virulently prejudiced you. She goes on to tell you you're not a human and don't have rights on numerous occasions. This continues until shit goes down and she feels the need to tell you that she's apparently had a change of heart, and it would have been a pleasure working with you - would being the operative word here, because not only did this relationship not have an "aww, she's learning to like you!" arc, but even if it wanted to, it simply would not have had the time to do so. These characters simply aren't worth the time and attention they're being given, especially considering how short the game is compared to its predecessors. Also, you're no longer a silent protagonist, but rather Prophet, who is somehow alive and suited up again after killing himself and giving you the suit in Crysis 2. Maybe there's a reason for that in some of the collectible datapads, but it's weird and I honestly don't think having a main character whose personality is "alien vision guy" does much to add to the story. Christ, why have I spent two paragraphs talking about the story of a Crysis game?

 

As said before, the gameplay is tip top. Aliens have been expanded, adding new enemy types and revamping the existing ones in Crysis 2. They were fun to fight then, and they're fun to fight now, with the added bonus of having alien weapons you can loot off their bodies if you don't eviscerate them too completely - which happens more than you would think. Stealth seems to have been nerfed somewhat, as I can't cloak quite as long, however the addition of the predator bow easily makes up for that, and sprinting no longer takes up suit energy (in fact, you can regain energy while sprinting), which is another great QOL feature. Also, throwing (or power kicking) objects at enemies actually does damage now! Hallelujah. The suit upgrade system from 2 has been brought back and revamped, now offering you more powers (including more that are actually worth equipping!) and adding challenges that can be completed to make your unlocked perks more effective. These can actually fairly heavily modify your gameplay style - making you cloak much more effectively, be able to stealth kill enemies without decloaking, or sacrificing move speed for immense damage reduction in armor mode. The game also has bosses! Plural! And unlike Crysis 1's boss, who was the bane of my existence, they're actually very satisfying to fight. Gun combat feels tight as usual, perhaps even moreso than in Crysis 2, and the attachment system is fairly in depth.

 

All in all, it's a solid title, even if it is a dip in quality from Crysis 2. It's most certainly worth playing, and an experience I enjoyed throughout. (Though it is worth noting there are several glitches in regards to the trophy hunt - difficulties seem to be glitched, possibly due to having to pop the veteran and supersoldier difficulties at the same time. I did a veteran run first, then super soldier, and had no issue. The collectibles can also be funky, and there's one in Post-Human that's extremely easy to miss.)

 

186: Superhot VR - 0.67%

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SUPER. HOT. SUPER. HOT.

 

Superhot VR is one of those early VR games, but it's one that's widely recommended as a must play PSVR game. It's certainly a spectacle - the game consists of dropping you in scenes where waves of enemies run at you and you have to use anything you can find in your environment to defend yourself against them; use shotguns or your hands to block bullets, chuck spent weapons at enemies, duck behind barrels, etc. It would be a fairly standard game if not for two things - one, the gimmick, which is to say that time only moves when you do (or when your controller is having tracking issues), and two, the low poly aesthetic, which is visually distinctive while working perfectly on the PS4's underpowered hardware.

 

The game is a blast. It's tense and chaotic while being strategic at the same time due to your ability to slow down time whenever you need to reconsider your situation. Levels consist of multiple scenes - one level starts with you punching an enemy and having their corpse drop out of a helicopter, and then the next scene has you playing a different character underneath that helicopter, watching the body fall out, and having to fight presumably the guy you had just played at. Unfortunately, it is a rather short blast. One of the challenges requires you to beat the game in under ten minutes, real time - I did so in under eight.

 

And, even more unfortunately, this port is dogshit. And I know I gripe a lot, but this time I'm saying it outright - this game clearly either wasn't playtested on PSVR to any acceptable degree, or the developers simply did not give a shit. There are no accessibility options (and no settings menu or even a pause menu to begin with), and you cannot turn with a button. This is a problem. If you do not know, the PSVR only really effectively covers a range of about 180 degrees in front of you. If your arms are at your sides or in front of you, you're fine. If they're not, you're not. Now, most PSVR games account for this by letting you turn around and reposition yourself as needed. Superhot VR does not. Your only options are to turn around in meat space and reposition yourself in meat space. Why is this a problem, you ask? Well, because the game frequently expects you to reach behind yourself, and weapons, which fly towards you when enemies die, typically land at your  feet or behind you. One particularly ill conceived level spawns you facing an enemy on a ledge in front of you, and then expects you to shoot down at a courtyard that exists entirely to your left. Another has weapons positioned behind you and to your left and right which I kept struggling to grab due to tracking issues.

 

But you know what? None of that really matters that much, because the game isn't that hard, and it's still fun even if it's buggy. Or that's what I would say if the game wasn't extremely short (once you've mastered it) and provided challenge runs to account for the bulk of its gameplay. Challenge runs such as headshots only, which removes the psychic kill power you get halfway through the game. Now, you can, theoretically, aim down the sights of guns in this game. Only that requires you to hold your move controller directly in front of your VR headset unless you're aiming at someone beneath you. This means that in many instances you're forced to attempt to get headshots while hipfiring, which is a daunting task, especially when every weapon you're provided is given an extremely limited supply of ammo. This also means it's possible to soft lock the game; since there's no menu, you can't quit levels directly; you can only do so in the screen before you start a level, which you can send yourself back to by shooting yourself. Unless you have no ammo. On one or two particularly egregious occasions, the last enemy had run behind a wall I physically could not aim around and was not attacking me, and I did not have the psychic blast which normally makes this level playable. Luckily, I realized my conundrum, and saved a bullet. Otherwise I would have had to restart the game. And that's to say nothing of the speedrun challenges, where many a run was ruined by me attempting to pick up a gun behind me or at my feet only for the tracking to bug out, advancing time any denying me a weapon. On top of this, the hitboxes in this game are rather ridiculous - you'll frequently die from the famed "punch the air a foot in front of your target" technique, and you'll sometimes watch bullets fly by your head only to be welcomed into the embrace of that ear shattering... shatter that makes up the game's death noise. Similarly, trying to throw or shoot around corners or walls is a complete crap shoot - items will frequently shatter in the air, not even grazing anything around them, and bullets are similarly corner averse. I've said it before and I've said it again - easy games can survive unfun or unfair mechanics. Hard games cannot. And the bulk of Superhot VR is attempting absolute precision in a game which denies you that at every turn.

 

The shame of it is that this game is fun. It's a great concept. But it fails to account for the PSVR's capabilities in any way and lacks basic functions like menus. I find it amusing that they thought to remove the suicide scenes in the game to make it more accessible, but failed to provide... any actual accessibility options to the game.

 

Either way, having this game platinumed is a load off my shoulders and has netted me my rarest platinum trophy - and by a decent margin if you don't count the abomination that is Pox Nora, my greatest shame. I spent a whole five hours straight working at the last two challenges (no deaths and the ten minute challenge) because I was too stubborn to give in despite my numerous embarrassing failures (including dying to the last two enemies of the game TWICE, once after I'd already killed them) and god damn did I pay for it. Was in complete physical agony after playing standing up for so long. It won't be a platinum I'll forget anytime soon, that's for sure.

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187: Disco Elysium: The Final Cut - 4.29%

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Disco Elysium is, without a doubt, one of the best games I've ever played. It's hard to really sell it without giving away too much - but it's kind of like if the dialogue and characters of Fallout New Vegas were an entire game, with all the extra depth that comes from that focus. Disco Elysium isn't just a game, it's as solid a candidate as you're likely to find for the age old "games as art" debate.

 

The main draw of Disco Elysium, without a doubt, is its dialogue system. I said it was like Fallout New Vegas's with more depth, but that doesn't even come close to describing it. You have 24 skills, all of which are relevant in conversation (some more than others), and as you might expect can be used to pass skill checks, but that's not nearly all they do. Every conversation is littered with dozens, if not hundreds of passive skill checks, which give your skills the opportunity to chime in on whatever you're discussing, or perhaps give you suggestions or detect lies or emotions in whoever you're talking to. And sometimes they just... bicker with eachother. Your skills aren't just tools to unlock new dialogue options, but rather personalities in and of themselves, forming a cabinet of advisors that advise you on your every action, almost all of which have distinct and memorable personalities, ranging from the dry Rhetoric to the almost delusional Inland Empire. And what's more is that they're not just win states either, where more of a skill is objectively better - failing skill checks, both active AND passive, can open up new dialogues or new routes to completing your objectives. Of all the games I've played that have implemented skill checks in dialogue, I don't think I've ever seen one that has rewarded failing them. Most people who have played Disco Elysium go as far as to say your first playthrough should be devoid of all save scumming and build optimization, and I would agree with them. Your first playthrough, as I once read someone say, is sacred.

 

Skill checks are not all that makes the dialogue distinctive, though. The choices you make through the game stick with you. Fail a skill check and come up with a shitty name at the start of the game? Yeah, you'll be hearing about that again. Find some new evidence? Go back to a conversation you were stuck on, and you might find a way to progress it. It is, without a doubt, the most intricate dialogue system I have ever experienced with a game, and by extension perhaps the best choice based RPG I've played. All of this is crowned by the fact that Disco Elysium has absolutely gorgeous writing. At times it feels more like reading a novel that contorts to fit your character than playing a game; there are a number of lines that will stay with me and are almost poetic in their delivery. Full voice acting (introduced in the Final Cut) makes conversations all the more rewarding.

 

The writing isn't all that's gorgeous, though. The game has this sort of cynical wistfulness to it. It takes place in a largely forgotten part of the world, a crushed city that's a mere ghost of itself after a failed revolution was crushed. This feeling is supplemented by the fact that you play as a detective who went on a bender so hard that he lost all of his memories; you're essentially a ghost of a person in a ghost of a world. There's an atmosphere of nostalgia and otherworldliness to it all, enhanced by the expressionist art style used for the characters and locations, and the melancholy soundtrack. And through it all, a surprising political literacy; while never going so far as to preach to the player (and allowing you to pursue ideologies I highly doubt the developers are sympathetic to, e.g. you can play as a racist fascist), the world of Disco Elysium is very politically complex, and it does, quite frequently, overlap with ours.

 

The story is, as you might expect, quite good. While it's the characters and dialogue that really shine, the plot is cohesive and original and well above average for what is essentially a point and click adventure game. Disco Elysium is really a game you want to discover for yourself, so I will drop the most barebones summary possible here: you, as mentioned before, are a detective who went on a vicious bender and wakes up with no knowledge of who you are. You soon discover that you are working a case, that up until now you have done absolutely fuck all to solve. There's a dead body that's been hanging outside your hotel for a week, seemingly connected to the harbor union that's been striking for months. Bemusedly dealing with your antics and growing to either resent or appreciate your eccentricity based on how you behave is your partner for the case, Kim, who is as solid a foil for your character's absurdity as you could ask for. On top of this main plot, there's a number of side quests you can undergo which all have their own little narratives and are highly rewarding. I compared it to Fallout New Vegas, but I should note that it is much smaller in scope, to its benefit. Instead of a wide and open but empty world, you have a rather small town to explore, rich with lore and with characters who all feel fully developed in a way most games can only ever dream of achieving.

 

There's not much to cover in regards to gameplay - as said before, it's a very dialogue heavy point and click game. You pick things up, talk to people, and find ways to accomplish various objectives, be they convincing somebody to do something, getting past an obstacle, or accomplishing some physical task. Besides skills, there's also thoughts, which are essentially perks you unlock through dialogue and can then internalize, offering you bonuses and negatives and sometimes new dialogue.

 

Christ, what a fucking game. The only real issues I have with it are that the ending is a bit linear... and also, the game is buggy as shit. My first playthrough was sabotaged by a glitch that happens when the game doesn't register a thought as internalized, leading to being unable to save ever again. I never had the same problem on subsequent runs, however I would advise anyone trying the game out to save frequently, and if you do get the glitch, reload your last save and it should be fine. At worst, stop internalizing the offending thought. Unfortunately, despite having worked on the setting of Disco Elysium for decades, the original creators of Disco Elysium have been booted from the company in a corporate takeover. It is now, as far as I can tell, being run by shareholders who they went to for funding. I would advise buying the game pre-owned or renting it if possible so as to avoid supporting these parasites. The CEO(?) was also accused of stealing money, however the lawsuit was dropped after he willingly returned it, which he is now using as proof that no theft ever occurred.

 

More here: https://gamerant.com/disco-elysium-former-developer-lawsuit-fraud-accusations-explained/

 

Lastly, I've heard some debate about whether or not the game is actually leftist or centrist, however having played the game and experienced all of its ideological routes in their entirety, I think it's safe to say the game leans quite heavily to the left. To explain my reasoning for this I'll have to spoil quite a bit of the game, however, so... have a spoiler.

Spoiler

The game offers four political ideologies, each of which unlocks a specific quest. You can be a downtrodden communist, a bastard fascist, a holier than thou moralist, or a hustling ultraliberal. While these choices do lend themselves towards the game being a centrist one, there is an undeniable leftist slant to it all. And yes, plenty of centrists and right wingers will play this game and come out of it thinking it was sympathetic to their ideologies, however I have had more than a few arguments with people who think that Star Trek didn't become 'woke' until Discovery, so it's safe to say that this is a case of cognitive dissonance demonstrating once again that it is a hell of a drug.

 

As mentioned before, there's four different ideologies you can subscribe to. I would say these are all played seriously, however the ultraliberal route says 'hustling' so much that I cannot treat it with any more respect than I would the average NFT enthusiast. When you get the prompt to subscribe to communism, you can ask your brain what exactly communism is, and in response you'll be told that it is failure. And this, on the surface, is an indictment on it, but if you ask your brain to elaborate, it's flipped on its head. Communism is the ideology of failure - that is to say, the crushed masses of the world who have had their spirits broken. It is not the most inspiring of speeches - "0.0001% of communism has been built", as you're told. The hopelessness of the setting doesn't do too much to add to this, either - Coalition gunships float above Revachol, more than able to bombard it as they did previously when they invaded to crush the previous communist uprising. And as the game progresses, you realize you're not really going to build communism all on your own, especially once your quest to find local communists leads you to a two person book club. And yet there's an undeniable sense of hope to the quest - not a sense of impending victory or anything of the sort, just a glimmer, really, but there nonetheless - especially since it's implied that (unrelated to your quest) the local union is hoping for the optics of a mercenary group attacking striking workers to instigate mass unionization, and the union boss seems competent enough for it to have a hope of working. Many of the best characters are also a part of said union - Manana and Titus, for instance. There's also a ridiculous, but heartwarming scene where one of your skills detects that a working class woman has worked all her life and suggests that you hug her. And if you do, she asks what you're doing, and you say, "I'm building communism, one hug at a time" and she hugs back appreciatively.

 

It's not all that solid a case for it until you examine the other routes.

 

First up is fascism. You have the opportunity to start talking about how we need Revachol for Revacholians, and can internalize a healthy dose of racism on top of this. This quest involves looking for fascist / racist brethren in Revachol. You find them, and... they're all complete fucking losers. The first racist is a drunken moron who, if you have enough of the right skill, you can figure out is only as edgy as he is because he's upset that he's not getting enough pussy. The second racist is a black supremacist meathead who speaks in all caps and keeps talking about how much of a degenerate you are, and if you get him in private, you find out that he's very appreciative of women from 'lesser' races, and despite having metric of fucktons of sex never allows himself to orgasm because that's emasculating. So he's buff, kind of terrifying, but he has enough clown in him to fuel multiple traveling circuses. The third racist is essentially a spineless worm with an authority fetish who (especially if you have high authority) can't stop gagging on your boots. The quest ends with you realizing all of your brethren are pathetic and that you will be the last true Revacholian, and you develop a ridiculous new expression and get a rising sun in your portrait. Also, Kim will likely hate you, given that he's the game world's equivalent of asian. Suffice to say, fascism sucks.

 

Secondly, let's do ultraliberalism! Ultraliberals in game are, as far as I can tell, the wealthy elite that presided over the transfer of Revachol's rule from communism to the Coalition. You are not one of the elite, nor will you ever be. What you can be is a douchebag who has conversations with himself about how much of a hustler he is. The questline involves talking to a magic cargo crate man who's incredibly rich and selling him shitty art in exchange for stocks, which are more or less useless, although you can buy a streetlight with them. Then you commission a homeless person to be your brand manager and turn a local statue into a promotion for you and your brand. The quest itself is... fine, I guess? But it's absolutely absurd and incapable of being taken seriously.

 

Thirdly, there's moralism. Moralists are essentially what leftists tend to refer to as liberals. The Coalition is moralist, and moralism's stated goals are essentially just keeping things the way there are, with a little bit of incremental progress to spice things up. On the surface, that is, because this same Coalition is described as having slaughtered the communists to extinction (I'm not sure if that's an exaggeration, but you do eventually meet a deserter who describes having to hide for decades) multiple times, and has the aforementioned gunships hovering around the city you're in. The moralist's... equivalent of Jesus? I don't know - is Dolores Dei, a seemingly pure, gentle authority who in fact was a brutal, murderous despot. The quest itself has you deciding that things aren't right and that someone should take responsibility for this situation - form a committee, even. And so you go on a quest to contact one of the gunships and make contact with the Coalition. It mainly consists of getting materials for a radio and getting a tech savvy person to help you. If you finish the quest, you get a game over where your character abandons his case altogether and disappears for several weeks; possibly due to bureaucracy, but some people speculate he was 'disappeared' due to dangerous knowledge of a certain anomaly.

 

... Suffice to say that while none of these quests are brimming with optimism, save for perhaps the misplaced hustler mentality of the ultraliberal, the game is clearly slanted towards communism, even if the game's characteristic bleakness applies to it as well. The game does a good job of taking an almost objective approach to its politics, though, which is likely why some people don't recognize its leftist leanings - but I believe this is solely due to tact as opposed to any ideological reservation. It is a shame that the average Twitter activist is not willing to examine politics as calmly. (But understandable; the emphasis on calm rationality is a hallmark of the moralist, after all!)

 

 

 

188: The Copper Canyon Shootout - 34.21%

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This review is going to be much shorter than the last, both because of the game's quality and also because... well, it's an 8$ game. There isn't that much to it.

 

The Copper Canyon Shootout is a member of that notorious mass of VR games known as wave shooters, a subgenre which I typically try to avoid, because, well... they're wave shooters. For what it is, though, the Copper Canyon Shootout is a solid enough game, reminding me of those on rails arcade games where you have to shoot enemies who pop out, only taken to an extreme. You're armed with two weapons, which can be two revolvers, two shotguns, or one of each. Not exactly an amazing amount of variety. The enemy variety is similarly small, with a few different types of robots as well as a single boss who appears at the end of every level, of which there's three. It's not an incredibly long game, and took me only a few hours to platinum.

 

The gameplay is solid enough. You have two guns, as mentioned, and you have to proceed through various western settings while hordes of robots pop out at you. And I do mean hordes - on later levels the amount of robots that spawn is absolutely absurd, and only really manageable through careful positioning and constant reloading. The guns are fine, but could use more impact and kick. The enemies, on the other hand, are quite a bit more impressive - robots have detachable limbs and heads, as well as boilers that explode when shot. This results in a cornucopia of robot gore - heads, limbs, and various other metal parts fly around the arena as you wreak havoc on them varmints. There's some strategy to this, too - shoot an enemy (or boss's) arms off and they can't attack you; shoot their heads off and they'll randomly fire around themselves for five seconds or so before exploding. You can also shoot bullets and mortar attacks out of the air, which is neat. The boss is similarly well designed in terms of destructability - you can remove all his arms fairly quickly, which prevents him shooting at you, but is not necessarily a good thing since he'll instead only fire mortar shells at you. To do damage to him, you have to shoot armor off his boiler, and after doing enough damage to his boiler or its armoring he'll briefly go invincible and either shoot mortar shells at you or do an area of effect ground pound attack.

 

All in all, it's a fun little VR game I bought for 4$ on sale. Would I go out of my way to recommend it? No. But it's fun enough and a nice dose of VR chaos in a small package.

 

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Whoops. Mad Games Tycoon briefly consumed my life and thus I am a bit behind on updates. In the last week I've managed to earn three new platinums. My goal for this year had been to reach 200, however due to circumstances I had to adjust this to 190 - which I've now surpassed. Hopefully I can earn a few more before the year's done with and bring myself closer to my original goal. Next year's goal will probably be either 250 or 260, depending on how ballsy I'm feeling.

 

Also going to try to reinstate the old backlog, if only so I have a definitive list of games I mean to play. (But not today, as I've already spent... two hours writing all this up. Good lord.)

 

189: Chicory: A Colorful Tale - 23.81%

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Chicory: A Colorful Tale is essentially a coloring book transformed into a game. You play as a dog janitor who is shocked to find the world has been drained of all its color, and being unable to contact the current wielder (a person responsible for coloring the entire world), you decide to take the brush yourself, as it's been your life long dream to be the wielder, leading you on a quest to color in the world again and deal with the corrupted roots and trees slowly spreading. The story, despite its rather simple premise, is surprisingly intricate and is one of the strongest points of the game. Second, of course, to the coloring mechanic, because... come on, it's in the name.

 

I said the game's essentially a coloring book, and that's because besides moving around, your primary method of doing... well, anything... is coloring things. Puzzles usually consist of painting objects that are sensitive to color and will activate when colored in. As the game progresses, you gain new traversal abilities, such as the ability to swim in paint, unlocking new areas that were previously inaccessible - is this a metroidvania? I think this might be a metroidvania. Perhaps the highlight of the game are the boss fights, which are imaginative and fun - they remind me of some of Undertale's more elaborate fights - even though as far as I can tell you can't die during them. The actual painting is... well, unless you're a particularly artistic type, you'll probably tire of coloring things in manually after a bit as I did and begin just using the fill pattern to automatically paint things. It's decent enough, but I rarely felt the need to color things just for the sake of coloring things, contributed to by the fact that the painting in this game is a bit... chunky. I don't really know how to describe it except that the paintings seem to be composed of very large, quirky pixels, which combined with using a joystick makes it hard to really draw anything good. Here's a redrawing I did of an in-game portrait as an example:

 

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It's... awkward. Some kind of reward for coloring things in may have helped, like the points you get for inking things in Splatoon, or the experience you get in Splatoon 3's campaign which lets you level up. As is, the coloring ends up mostly being a tool to enable you to progress through puzzles - which is a rather novel mechanic, but fails to really make for an incredibly exciting game. Besides this, you get to run around the (sort of) open world, find new puzzles, color things in, and find lost children and pick up trash. I'd say it's fun, but rather bland overall - maybe a 7/10 for the gameplay in general, though the boss fights are a noticeable spike in quality.

 

That brings us to (in my opinion) the real draw of the game - the story and atmosphere. The game's charming and lighthearted, but at the same time manages to touch on serious issues. A significant amount of the plot focuses around Chicory (who, surprisingly enough, is not the player character), her depression, and her relationship with art, as well as your own character's. It's hardly Disco Elysium, but it's certainly more original than the stories of most games I play these days.

 

Then there's the atmosphere. This ties into the painting a little bit. The world is littered with various cute NPCs of different animal species, some of whom will want you to do various tasks for them (pick up litter, engage in kidnapping find lost children, decorate with furniture, or paint something). You get the opportunity to redraw colorful versions of old paintings that lost their color, design signs, and create custom clothing, which makes me nostalgic for the Drawn to Life games. Additionally, NPCs will react to your decorations and coloring - color in a scene, and you might come back later to see a familiar face admiring it and commenting on your coloring. Put down furniture, and you'll get some unique encounters with people stopping to rest. This, more than the coloring itself, makes the world come alive and makes you feel like you're actually doing something. There's also a variety of side quests you can undertake, including one very amusing one that ends with a scene straight out of Ace Attorney, music and all. It all makes for a world that's surprisingly delightful to be in.

 

All in all, Chicory's a fun, charming little indie game and one I'd solidly recommend purely for how unique and imaginative it is, even if it can sometimes feel a little slow. Certainly one of the better PS+ Extra games I've played so far.

 

190: Sherlock: Chapter One - 35.65%

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Sherlock: Chapter One, like Frogwares' previous game, the Sinking City, is an open world investigation game. While I enjoyed the Sinking City, I found it to be a very flawed experience, with big ambitions held back by the capabilities of Frogwares, a rather small studio. Unfortunately, the same can be said for Sherlock: Chapter One, except perhaps even moreso.

 

Where to begin? You play as a young Sherlock Holmes before he met John Watson, however he appears to have some form of DID and instead of John Watson as a companion, you get an imagined companion named... Jon. The story revolves around Sherlock coming back to the island of Cordona to clear up some mysteries regarding his mother's death, all the while solving crime and taking on police cases. Also, going on shooting sprees, apparently. Combat is back, and while it made sense in the run down, Lovecraftian setting of the Sinking City, it makes... less sense here. More on that later. Through the course of the game's story, you'll make friends with an eccentric artist, undertake some cases for Mycroft, and discover what really happened to your mother, all while being accompanied by Jon.

 

As you would imagine in an investigative game, the cases are the main draw here - finding evidence, figuring out who did it, and accusing the correct suspect. Sherlock: Chapter One is rather interesting in that it makes the endings of most cases ambiguous, allowing you to figure out who the most likely suspect is on your own, never telling you whether you were wrong or right. (The only way to tell is that the right answers seem to give you more money at the end of the case, which is hardly definitive.) An advantage the game has over the previous games is that it has far more content available - as many main cases as the more linear Sherlock games had, plus quite a few side cases, most of which are of similar quality to the main cases save for a few which just consist of going to a scene and reconstructing the crime and little else.

 

All in all, the idea of an open world investigation game is unique and interesting, and the game is definitely worth a try. There's just one problem - or rather, one big problem composed of many, many little problems - and that's that Frogwares clearly does not have the resources to do it well. The Sinking City was a new IP, and thus there was nothing previously to compare it to, but Sherlock: Chapter One pales in comparison to the older, linear Sherlock games. What little the open world brings to the table fails to make up for what was lost in the exchange.

 

The biggest issue is that the cases feel more like side quests in an open world RPG like the Witcher than they do the actual meat of an investigative game. While older Sherlock games had you solving puzzles, reconstructing journeys through indigenous temples, and getting into chases and stake outs, Sherlock: Chapter One has none of that. The cases more or less play out like this: get new case, look at case description to find where you have to go, go to house, enter house, talk to person, examine everything in the house, maybe reconstruct what happened, go to either the police station, town hall, or newspaper to search for clues in the archives, go to another house or outside crime scene, examine more evidence, maybe follow some tracks using your witcher Sherlock senses. If it's a side case, you'll typically have to go up to someone and accuse them of the crime, while in the main case you'll link evidence together to decide what happened and then accuse someone of the crime. There's a few additional diversions thrown into cases - sometimes you get put in an arena and have to fight off waves of enemies, which often feels largely disconnected from whatever you were doing two minutes ago. Sometimes you have to dress up in a disguise to get people to talk to you. Sometimes you have to show evidence to random strangers on a street. Sometimes you need to do a math minigame to do a chemical analysis on evidence. It all gets to feeling very 'rinse and repeat' by the end of the game, as opposed to the linear Sherlock games, where every case was unique and handcrafted.

 

What little is added by the open world format is... underwhelming. There's a disguise system, where you have to wear certain clothes for cases, only it's extremely inconsistent in its implementation. In the wardrobe menu, there's five sliders showing you what factions your clothes will make you popular or unpopular with, except in many cases these don't matter whatsoever, and you have to be wearing a specific outfit or recreating your outfit from a character. And besides that, it's a feature that very rarely shows up, and when it does it's usually to talk to someone and get them to tell you something, and then you can unequip your disguise safely. It's a far cry from the more elaborate disguise sections of other games - I distinctly recall one ending in a bar fight, if I recall correctly. No such luck here.

 

Then you have navigation. In theory, having to manually figure out where people live would be an interesting usage of an open world. The reality is, as I mentioned previously, almost every case outright tells you "go to the intersection of [x] and [y]" or "go to the end of [x]". At best, you'll be told to go to the forest or the cemetery. This adds nothing to the game. The only difference between this and a loading screen is that this takes longer and requires briefly looking at a map. Secondly, you have random NPCs who you can ask about evidence. This is... fine, I guess? Except they never have unique dialogue, they just repeat some rinse and repeat line like "I can help you with that", and it's sometimes confusing as to who you're supposed to talk to. On one case I was stuck because I was looking for rich people on the docks to talk to, but it turned out that you had to speak to one specific rich person even though there was nothing to distinguish him from all the others except maybe that he didn't despawn when you turn your back on him. Lastly, the archives from the Sinking City are back. Simply put, you'll sometimes find evidence which requires you to search the archives using keywords to find old articles or evidence. It's not really that engaging, and it's often confusing and requires you to guess. E.g. one case I got stuck on because the killer left a poetic note on a chalkboard and a hat with a feather on it, and from this I was somehow supposed to intuit that I was searching for a criminal pattern - not evidence, or a suspect, or crime documentation, but a criminal pattern. Maybe I missed a line of dialogue that would have made it clear that this was the signature of a gang, but there was nothing in the evidence that suggested it.

 

There's also the combat, which... well, you could remove it from the game entirely and it would affect very little, if anything at all. Every combat section takes place in a square arena where enemies keep bursting out of the doors. This leads to incredulous sections where Sherlock singlehandedly takes down an entire mob of enemies, only to return to normal gameplay afterwards and typically have no comment made on that feat of violence. The combat itself is rather clunky - if you don't want to kill enemies, you have to shoot off any armor they might have, shoot a weak spot, and then they'll raise their hands and you have to run up to them and engage in a QTE to knock them out. If you want to kill them, you just shoot them in the head, or in the leg a few times, which would be far more fun if it didn't result in Jon scolding you for killing people every single kill. The Sinking City's combat was actually interwoven into the rest of the game - you'd find monsters running around on some abandoned streets or in the various houses you can enter, and it actually made sense that, yes, you would probably need to shoot the shit out of these Lovecraftian abominations. On the other hand, it makes absolutely no sense for Sherlock to be running around going on killing sprees, especially since there is literally no consequence except for your imaginary friend being annoying. (And he is always annoying.)

 

Speaking of Jon: Jesus Christ, shut the FUCK up. Jon is your constant companion, and enjoys commenting on everything you do. He even has a little diary you can read where he will, theoretically, comment on your cases and your actions. The only problem is that he only has a few lines of dialogue, both written and spoken, for every particular action, and he really likes to comment on you asking the wrong people about evidence or searching for the wrong keywords in the archives. This makes doing either thing unbearable, as because of how vague both systems are, you'll very often end up searching the wrong keywords or asking the wrong person (or not being in the right disguise) about a piece of evidence, and after one or two failed attempts every single try will have Jon whine about your incompetence and write one of 4 or 5 different comments in his diary, which renders the diary more or less unusable and made me frequently consult guides just to not have to listen to his complaining. Killing people, as mentioned before, also does this, which is a shame since killing people is by far the most fun and effective way to deal with enemies.

 

Meanwhile, what is lost from previous games is: unique locations, e.g. being hunted in a forest or having to solve a puzzle in a factory; more intricate and in depth cases, and the overall quality of environments. Since Sherlock has to be able to abandon every case at any point to go hunt collectibles, there are very few cutscenes outside of dialogue, you no longer commit to intricate plans like disguising yourself as a working class man and getting in a bar fight or staking out a house waiting for a criminal, and since every location has to tie back into the open world, the vast majority of your cases take place in houses or on the streets in between houses, which quickly leads to them feeling stale compared to the uniquely designed setpieces that were made for each individual case in the linear Sherlock Holmes games. Also, again, there are no puzzles unless you count the chemical analysis math game. Environments no longer feel alive or interactable, they're just a collection of cookie cutter investigation mechanics that you'll engage with in every main case. Mind you, the cases are still fun. But they don't feel like they're a game in and of themselves. They feel like you're playing (admittedly much more intricate) Witcher 3 sidequests.

 

Despite all this ranting, I don't dislike this game. I thought it was pretty fun. Nothing extraordinary, and very much flawed, much like its predecessor was, but it's undoubtedly a step up in quality. If Frogwares does decide to continue with this format, at least they're improving. (Though their next Sherlock game is going to be a linear one, thank god!) It's just that I was a huge fan of the previous Sherlock games I played - Crimes & Punishments and The Devil's Daughter - and I want more of that, not a character who seems only tangentially related to Sherlock running around an empty city. Admittedly, most people

 

But it is an interesting concept. And if Frogwares can figure out how to get the best aspects of both this and their linear games' together, they might have something great. As is it's a solid 7.5/10 - nothing extraordinary, at times frustrating, but nonetheless an enjoyable experience and one worth playing if only for the fact that it's not a type of game you see often.

 

191: Mad Games Tycoon - 10.58%

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Mad Games Tycoon, or: how I made billions of dollars through predatory monetization in F2P games and cemented my transformation into EA by buying and shutting down every other game developer.

 

Have you played Game Dev Tycoon? If not, you probably should. Game Dev Tycoon is an incredibly addictive game that puts you at the head of a games company and takes you through all of gaming history to make your mark on the world. In practice, it's a "line go up" simulator, which is incredibly addictive. Something about releasing a game and seeing it smash your sales records is just way more stimulating than it has any right to be. 

 

There's only one problem. Game Dev Tycoon isn't on Playstation. What is on Playstation, then? Mad Games Tycoon. I initially bought this game thinking it'd be an off brand GDT, and since I'd played the hell out of that, a bit of variety couldn't hurt. I was... half right? Mad Games Tycoon has enough glitches and UI problems that you could look at it and say "ah yes, the Game Dev Tycoon we have at home", but it also has an unprecedented amount of depth and variety that GDT lacks. GDT was a fairly linear, guided experience. You don't make any of your offices - you start in a garage, then you upgrade to a small, prefurbished office with a few more slots for new employees, then you upgrade to a bigger office. The most customization you can do is investing in a console development section for the building. The maximum number of staff you can have is 7. Mad Games Tycoon, on the other hand, takes the safeties off. You design every office yourself - game dev rooms, research rooms, even toilets and break rooms. You also handpick and assign every employee yourself. All 100+ of them if you're successful enough to grow that large. This was my office at the end of my last game of MDT:

 

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And this is your office at the end of Game Dev Tycoon:

 

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Now, granted, one of these pictures is a complete fucking clusterfuck and the other one isn't. But how am I supposed to make billions off of F2P games without a hundred employees and a quarter of my office space dedicated to server rooms?

 

That's basically the overall vibe of Mad Games Tycoon - it's bigger, meatier, and it's also a complete goddamn mess. The UI is a nightmare. Manually assigning 100 employees to their new offices makes me crave nuclear armageddon. But it very successfully nails the addictiveness of Game Dev Tycoon (I spent four consecutive days doing barely anything except playing it), and there's so much more of it. You can publish your own games and control every aspect of the manufacturing process, and even become a publisher for other games companies. You can buy shares in other companies until you own them completely, then force them to only release games for your consoles, or shut them down altogether. Or you can never bother with 100% ownership and just use their shares as stocks to sell later in the game for a profit. You can create sweatshops where every square inch of each room is taken up by desks and random objects your employees ask for because that's the most efficient way to use office space. Game development is now a multi stage process - you develop your game, you market it, you send it through your various other studios (graphics, motion capturing, and music) to improve it, and lastly, you manufacture copies of it and make sure to keep up with demand without manufacturing so many that you end up with 500k unsold copies. If that was all I had to say about MGT, I would give it a ten out of ten and be on my way.

 

But it's not. As said before, it's janky as fuck. MGT's UI is the developer's vengeance against gamers for our various crimes against humanity, born of sheer hatred and contempt. For one thing, it's broken as hell - dropping workers into rooms and even clicking through menus often ends up with accidentally picking up furniture or other people (which is extremely annoying when you're running a sweatshop and every room is packed to capacity), menus frequently glitch out (if you scroll to or past the 1 million option in your production room the only way to produce less copies is to exit out and try again; when trying to remarket a game it sometimes selects your newest game, which you can't remarket yet, making the menu inoperable unless you exit it and try again. There's basically a lot of menus getting stuck and having to close and open them again.), and even when they're working fine there's near sadistic game design choices at play. For instance, on 4 or so occasions, I was doing something else and clicking buttons, as one does in a video game, when the pop up for my game being finished came up. Now, a game being finished doesn't mean it's finished. You still want to run it through every possible improvement and clear it of bugs, otherwise it'll get a shit review score and sell worse than Battleborn (my beloved). Unfortunately, should you doing things coincide with this notification popping up on your screen, and you happen to be pressing x (which is used to select just about everything in the game) as or immediately after it pops up, you'll get locked into publishing it immediately, with no option to back out except deleting the game. This means that you're forced to sell a half baked game which will sell poorly at best, and at worst bankrupt you (AAA games get expensive, yunno.) A similar situation happens within the publishing menu - if you accidentally click on finding a publisher instead of self-producing, there is no way to go back and choose to self-produce. This is, luckily, not nearly as disastrous, but still not great for your sales, as publishers take a big cut.

 

Additionally, some features seem half baked - F2P games are way too easy to make a huge profit off of, the game development menu is highly esoteric, and buying developers is almost useless (at the end of the game they'll cost you 2 million a month each, and they earn you almost nothing with their game releases).

 

Were it not for these issues, I would easily recommend this game over GDT. As is, I'll still easily recommend it, but for all of GDT's linearity and simplicity, it is a polished, fully functioning game, and as such cannot be wholly discounted. If you like watching numbers go up and want to sell 10 million copies of a game called Dogwoman (it's a licensed title, I swear), this game is an easy sell, particularly on sale. Game Dev games of this sort are incredibly addicting and this is no exception - if anything, it's even more addicting due to games taking longer and having more depth. If you don't like watching numbers go up... well, this would be where I would call you a communist, except even communists like watching numbers go up, so I don't even know what's going on with you. You should also buy this game, it will probably help.

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Everyone else is doing these, so I may as well, too. Without further ado, I present...

 

The 2022 Altar of Fame!

 

I've never been that good at ranking games, especially compared to eachother (recency bias certainly doesn't help) so I'm going to do something a bit different this year - instead of ranking the best game of the year and a followup or two, I'm going to conjure my top three for every category and give them an equal chance at the spotlight. So here goes!

 

Best Flat Games

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Disco Elysium - Civilization VI - Horizon Forbidden West

 

Disco Elysium I gave an absolutely glowing review to just a few weeks ago, and so I doubt you need to see me expound its virtues once more. Suffice it to say, Disco Elysium is perhaps the best character & dialogue driven RPG I've played. It reads like a novel, and an exquisite one at that, and there are no throwaway NPCs - every character has something important to tell you and a role play in the story, and every conversation is rich with opportunities to learn more about yourself and other characters through your various skills. For a while, I thought of Disco Elysium as one of those games that's 'good but over hyped', and having played it, I can say I was wrong - it's not over hyped at all.

 

Civilization VI is probably my proudest platinum of the year, and by far the most addicting game I played this year. Civilization's motto as a franchise has become "one more turn", and it's entirely accurate - there's always just a bit more you want to do ; another city to settle, a building to complete, or a war to win. While the PS4 port suffers a host of issues, it is nonetheless a fantastic game and my 100% journey was one I savored every second of. The cycle of expanding your cities, forming alliances (and breaking them), and building up your civilization is wholly engrossing and it's no wonder the series has proven as popular as it is.

 

Horizon: Forbidden West is a solid sequel to one of my favorite exclusives of last gen, Horizon: Zero Dawn. It for the most part builds on what Zero Dawn offered, providing some of the best visuals on the PS5, a solid story, and a new region full of colorful tribes and unique new robots to fight. The weapon and robot variety has been massively improved since Zero Dawn, as has the selection of mounts - in Zero Dawn you could only mount two robots that were essentially slightly altered versions of the same body type, however Forbidden West allows you to mount massive boars and birds on top of the typical stag-like robots. Unfortunately the game also had some glaring issues - namely, in an attempt to make the game more difficult than Zero Dawn, they somehow managed to make it more frustrating without really addressing the difficulty too much beyond the early game.

 

Best VR Games

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Pistol Whip - Skyrim VR - The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners

 

Pistol Whip is, as far as I'm concerned, the definitive VR rhythm game. I've seen both Superhot VR and Pistol Whip compared to John Wick movies, but while Superhot VR made me feel like an idiot struggling with shitty VR controls, Pistol Whip actually delivered on that promise. It knows it, too, as its platinum, "You're Breathtaking" is an obvious Keanu Reeves reference with a trophy icon to match. Pistol Whip takes you through levels rendered in a Superhot-esque low poly style filled with enemies, and tasks you with shooting (or pistol whipping) them to the beat, all while dodging tsunamis of bullets and obstacles in your way. Beat Saber is a great game with a huge music library - but Pistol Whip takes rhythm gameplay and makes it feel like part of something bigger, to say nothing of how much better a workout it is since you actually have to move around and dodge obstacles as opposed to simply swinging your arms around.

 

Skyrim VR is one of the strongest arguments for VR I've seen, and honestly, it isn't even that good a VR port. Even playing on my PS5, equivalent to a PS4 Pro for Skyrim VR, it's a blurry mess, and VR implementation is minimal outside of combat. And yet the appeal of a 100+ hour RPG in VR is massive, and Skyrim VR very easily delivers on that. There are plenty of VR games that are better VR games, but there are few VR games that actually let you get lost in them the way Skyrim VR does. And I did get lost in this game - anyone who's paid attention to this thread probably knows that this year has been a rough one for me, and my Skyrim sessions were a much needed relief from everything else I had to deal with.

 

The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners is here for a similar reason that Skyrim VR is, which is to say, there just aren't that many long games in VR that you can really get lost in. The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is one such game, with the difference that it's built for VR from the ground up - and unfortunately has less content as a result. But it's still one of the few fully realized, full length games exclusively for VR, and that makes it quite impressive. The gameplay consists of excursions to various locations in the city to do quests and get resources, while having to fend off human and undead enemies and occasionally sparing resources or going on a quest for survivors you meet. In the early game, you won't have many good crafted weapons, and as such you fight with whatever you can find - broken bottles, for instance, and sometimes even spoons. (Finding out I could kill a zombie with a spoon through the eye socket was probably one of my favorite moments in this game.) Fighting zombies feels fantastic - weapons get stuck in their heads and have to be pulled out, and you can shoot zombies' limbs off. The story isn't as in depth as Skyrim's tends to be, but there's still a cast of sympathetic characters to work with and enemies worth fighting.

 

Best Indie Games

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Severed Steel - Ziggurat 2 - Hypnospace Outlaw

 

Severed Steel took me by surprise. I'm a big fan of the recent resurgence of boomer shooters, and eagerly await more of the genre to make its way to consoles. So picking up Severed Steel was almost an obligation for me. Needless to say, it took me by surprise just how fun a game it is. Severed Steel is a high octane murder orgy that could probably best be described as a combination of Mirror's Edge and Superhot. You have a ridiculous amount of mobility options - wall running, diving (which can function as a horizontal third jump), slide kicking, and climbing walls by... repeatedly kicking off of them. All of these stunts render you invulnerable while performing them, which is good, because on the suggested difficulty (not the default, which is the difficulty between easy and 'normal') you die in under a second if you're standing still. On top of this, you can slow down time, leading to an action movie-esque slaughter where you're either constantly moving or you're dead. The game also has an absolutely fantastic soundtrack and the visuals, while primitive at times, are flashy and more than adequate to carry the gameplay along.

 

Ziggurat 2 is a sequel to one of my favorite roguelikes, the original Ziggurat. Like its predecessor, Ziggurat 2 is an FPS, fantasy-themed roguelike where you battle through dungeons armed with spell books, staves, wands, and alchemical weapons which are essentially various types of guns, all while running around at breakneck speed. Throughout your runs you unlock a wide variety of perks and other buffs, which can lead to absolutely ridiculous builds, and the characters are much more diverse than in 1 and all feel significantly different to play. While I preferred the 'pure' roguelike approach of 1, the missions in 2 add to replayability and allow for a sense of progress between runs. All in all, it's a gorgeous sequel to a fantastic roguelike, and well worth playing.

 

Hypnospace Outlaw is a lovely indie game that fills that niche of 'games you're better off not knowing anything about before playing'. The short of it is that you're essentially an internet moderator browsing a fictional version of the 90s web, finding hidden webpages and peeking into people's personal lives. Its virtual internet is a joy to explore, and the characters within are surprisingly deep. It's a fantastic game and one I recommend wholeheartedly.

 

Best Multiplayer

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Back 4 Blood - Orcs Must Die! 3 - Astroneer

 

Back 4 Blood is a new game from the developers of Evolve - yeah, that game - and some former developers of Left 4 Dead. This time around, they're sticking to what works - which is to say, Left 4 Dead - with a hefty batch of improvements and changes, including card based decks which allow you to radically alter your gameplay style. While difficulty was botched at launch, the game's since filled out quite well. Decks allow you to customize your runs and play a variety of roles - support, melee, sniper, shotgunner, to say nothing of utilities such as being able to interact with objects (including objectives) faster. The gunplay is solid, melee combat is fun as fuck when you have a good build for it, and the DLC released since launch has all been fantastic, adding new characters and significant amounts of new levels to the game. While the game lacks any proper versus mode, instead having a PvP survival mode, the co-op side of the game is solid, and since launch they've buffed the bots so now solo is entirely viable as well. It's a solid successor to Left 4 Dead and one of my favorite multiplayer games I've played in the last year.

 

Orcs Must Die! 3 is a follow up to the somewhat popular series of tower defense-esque third person shooter games. The premise is simple - waves of orcs and other monsters are trying to get to your magic crystal (or whatever the fuck), and you have to place traps, shape paths, and use a variety of weaponry to stop them. It's chaotic and fun, and the entire campaign can be played with a second person, who'll get a unique character with different abilities from yours.

 

Astroneer is, like Orcs Must Die! 3, not inherently a multiplayer game, however the entire game can be played with multiple players and benefits from doing so immensely. Astroneer is a base building, resource harvesting sort of game where you build increasingly advanced bases and vehicles on planets, harvest what resources are available on them, and then move on to the next planet, solving mysterious pillars all the while. It's an engaging gameplay loop, and the planets are all interesting enough to keep things engaging in tandem with the increasingly complicated technology you can unlock, including automated factories (which we luckily did not have to mess with too much.) The game gets regular content updates, although unfortunately the developers have opted for a live service approach to the game and as such much of the content is locked to events, though during our playthrough they did add musical snail companions permanently which were a fun addition, even if they required restarting our game to properly utilize. The game is, however, unfortunately rather glitchy - we made the mistake of letting my friend, who is on PS4, host the game, and that resulted in some odd crashes that made it impossible for me to revisit some planets in her game. So if you do play MP, I suggest getting someone who isn't using a base PS4 to host.

 

Best Nintendo Game

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Animal Crossing: New Horizons

 

This list is a bit shorter because... well, my Switch backlog isn't exactly huge at this point, and if I were to list three Switch exclusives I liked, I'd be listing almost all of the ones I've played.

 

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a game I never really expected to life. When my girlfriend got me a copy for my birthday this year, I was a bit worried I wouldn't like it, since it's never been a game series I've felt particularly drawn to - I recall trying to play one of the AC games on the DS as a teen, but ultimately found it uninteresting. Fast forward to now, and it's my most played Switch game by a long shot. There's something satisfying about having an island to slowly renovate and build up as you pay off your loans, and the villagers are charming companions to interact with, even if their interactions aren't as deep as they could be (supposedly, past games had more in depth villager interactions, but I can't speak on that). There's a ton to do in the game, particularly with the Happy Home Paradise DLC, which I haven't played as much of as I should have, and even with all the time I've spent in it so far I have a ton of work left on my home and island. It's a surprisingly easy game to invest in, and it's become a fun little habit to check on it a bit every day before getting to my more serious trophy hunting.

 

Best Disappointments

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Kena: Bridge of Spirits - Gran Turismo 7 - Overwatch 2

 

I almost feel bad putting Kena: Bridge of Spirits next to these other two, but it does share the distinction of being a game that I actively gave up on because of how little I liked it. Usually with uninteresting games I'll shelve them for later and simply never end up getting back to them; there are a few games, however, that I decide I'm through with. Kena is ultimately a decent enough game, somewhat similar to Stray in that it's a pretty PS indie game with little depth. One core difference, however, is that Kena is a much larger game, with combat and all, and all of it is just... mediocre. It's a pretty game, yes, but you can only look at the same pretty green environments for so long before you wish for some variety. And the combat is bland at best and frustrating at worst, with some of the most bizarre parry timing I've ever seen in a game. It's not a game I dislike, but ultimately, I just didn't see any reason to continue on with it.

 

I've admittedly never played any Gran Turismo games, so maybe I'm just missing something here. But man. I was expecting a somewhat decent racing game from Gran Turismo 7 and instead I got a bizarre attempt at a live service racing game with a campaign that seems to want you to spend almost as much time in menus as actually racing. Between the low race payouts, loot boxes that only ever gave me the lowest payouts, having to listen to a Disneyfied caricature of a person drone on about car history every one to three races, and the sluggishness of the menus, the game's just not that fun as a singleplayer experience. It's pretty, but that's about the only thing I have to say about it. The last straw for me was having to go through ten glorified tutorials in the form of braking challenges in order to unlock the next tier of races. Is it too much to ask for that you be able to play multiple races in a racing game without five minute interludes of doing absolutely nothing?

 

Overwatch 2 is a glorified update whose most significant changes to the game are taking six years worth of skins that could be earned for free and making them cost 20$ each, and changing the standard team composition from 2 healers, 2 tanks, and 2 DPS to 2 healers, 1 tank, and 2 DPS, which not only failed to do anything to reduce DPS queues but made queueing for tank take longer too, meaning that the all roles queue is essentially now just a second healer queue. On top of this, in order to balance the game for 5v5, they massively buffed tanks, which means that every other casual gamemode has had its balance utterly fucked, as every team based gamemode is now a race to see which team has more players willing to switch to tank. The PVE that was the entire reason for Overwatch 2 existing is absent, too, save for some extremely unimpressive 15 minute levels in the new events (which are completely underwhelming) since you can only earn one skin per event as opposed to the 6+ legendaries I was earning per event in OW1. To add to this, the launch was a complete mess and the first month and a half or so consistently had at least one hero removed from the roster, new heroes (*coughSojourncough*) are unbalanced, and they added a godawful season long map rotation which means that the game actually has less available maps than OW1 did. Also, the battle pass is a terrible value and doesn't give you back any currency, and it would take the majority of a year completing weekly challenges to afford a single skin. They also raised the OWL skins' prices for absolutely no reason.

 

And now for the genre highlights!

Which is to say, my favorite games of particular genres I tend to play a lot of. These'll just be games without detailed descriptions, to cut down on this post's length a bit.

 

Best FPS

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Terminator: Resistance Enhanced - Crysis 2 Remastered - Severed Steel

 

Best Simulation / Strategy

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Civilization VI - Planet Coaster - Mad Games Tycoon

 

Best RPG

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Disco Elysium - Cyberpunk 2077 - Skyrim VR

 

Best Puzzle

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Operation: Tango - Manifold Garden - Superliminal

 

 

Best Roguelike

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The Binding of Isaac: Repentance - Ziggurat 2 - Hades

 

And that's, as they say, all, folks! May 2023 be a great year for gaming. My goal for next year is to hit 250 platinums and clear up at least half of my PSVR1 backlog before switching to PSVR2 (which I may not do until 2024.) Let me know what you think of my rankings and your thoughts if you've played any of the games I've listed!

 

Edited by Darling Baphomet
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Two new platinums! Both rather easy ones while I work on Beat Saber and Evil Dead: The Game - the latter of which I doubt I'll platinum for a month or two; currently demons are massively underpowered causing a mass exodus of demon players and longer queue times for survivors, so hopefully they get a balance change that I'll be able to take advantage of for my demon wins. Fun game either way, though.

 

Also going to start re-adding my backlog to my posts. This one will mostly just be a skeleton so that I can keep editing and adding to it as games come up without having to make a new post just for my backlog.

 

All in all, I'm much closer to my original goal of 200 platinums by the end of this year than expected! I think I'm going to be a bit ambitious this time and gamble on not spending another two months in a hostel and set my sights for 275 by 2023. Not altogether too unreasonable, as even with all the URs I've been chasing the last few months I've still been able to keep up a reasonable rate of platting games. I should finish this year at 195 unless the PS5 Severed Steel patch gets delayed to next year, since that game's almost ready to pop, and I'm a good ways through QUBE 2 as well.

 

192: TOEM - 69.69%

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I think this might be it. The perfect platinum percentage. My career as a trophy hunter has reached it apex.

 

... Anyway, Toem is charming little indie game wherein you run around cute, blocky locales doing quests for people and taking pictures of everything interesting you come across. It's a very short game, but that only adds to its charm - it's a bite sized serving of perfection that prefers to end to soon than outstay its welcome.

 

The gameplay is fairly straightforward - it's kind of like a collectathon minus any sort of platforming or combat. You're a kid on a journey and have to get stamps from helping people to exchange for free bus rides to the next town. This takes you from helping ghosts in creepy forests to snapping pics at a fashion show in a bustling city, all rendered in a uniquely charming, blocky, grayscale style, all the while taking photos from a first person perspective which allows you to discover things you might otherwise miss from your regular top down perspective. I'm not actually really sure how to describe it in a way that does it justice, so here's a screenshot:

 

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Is there a story? Well, yes, kind of. But this isn't a story or dialogue heavy game. Its characters, while charming, rarely have more than a few lines of dialogue. In a way this adds to the wistfulness of the whole journey. Really, the story isn't important to Toem - what's important is the journey you undertake and the memories you make (and pictures you take) along the way.

 

I really don't have much to criticize about this game. It's fun, it's charming, and it's nice to look at. It's a very casual game, and not particularly hard, nor is it a grind. It doesn't try to throw filler at you or otherwise outstay its welcome. It does what it sets out to do, and then it's over. (Save for the free DLC, which adds a new vacation island location for you to do quests in!)

 

Anyway, definitely one of the better games I've gotten from PS+ and I highly recommend it.

 

193: Red Matter - 37.89%

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Red Matter is a gorgeous, sci-fi puzzle game wherein you take the role of an astronaut working for a western power infiltrating an abandoned communist base on one of Saturn's moons - basically a 'cold war in space' vibe going on here, which I don't think I've seen before. It's an eery, atmospheric adventure with some of the best graphics I've seen on the PSVR.

 

The gameplay is fairly typical for a VR puzzle game, and if you've played a decent number of them, you've probably played a similar game. You move from room to room (though 'room' is a bit of a disservice here as the locations are quite large at times) completing puzzles which allow you to progress further through the base. The puzzles are all very grounded and realistic, which is a nice touch - you'll be reading diagrams, restarting power plants, accessing the emergency override for an airlock, etc. It feels a lot more mechanical and in depth than other VR puzzle games, whose puzzles are often very simplistic in nature. Red Matter's are simplistic too, admittedly (and I don't think this is a bad thing - being stuck and not knowing what to do is infinitely more frustrating in a VR game than in a flat one) but the additional steps required to execute them makes them feel a lot more realistic and meaningful.

 

Throughout your journey through the moon base, you'll be finding notes and other clues as to what happened to the occupants of the base. It's not a very story heavy game in the traditional sense - you don't really have people talking to you outside of your mission commander, and there's only a few sections that could really be considered cutscenes, and even so just barely. But the game has a very strong atmosphere and a genuinely enthralling mystery to uncover. I was not expecting a good story from it, just interesting puzzles, so I was very pleasantly surprised. That atmosphere, of course, is fueled by creepy scenes you'll stumble across and the dark, creepy corridors that occupy much of the first half of the game - I was initially a bit worried it might veer into horror territory, but it luckily only ever ventures into being creepy and tense, no jumpscares required.

 

The gameplay is fairly standard for a VR game - you have your teleport-dash, your slow regular locomotion, and three tools at your disposal - what looks like a tablet on a tiny selfie stick that displays mission objectives and can be used to scan objects and translate documents you find in the base. You also have a grabby hand tool, which is... interesting? It works well, and it mostly grabs things realistically, although it's a bit funny that you can't simply grab things. There's also a flashlight, but it's so weak that I almost never used it, since scanning bare ground with your scanner-objective display-tablet illuminates things more significantly.
 

All in all, I can't really complain about this game. It's competently designed, and again, a very pretty game by PSVR1 standards, and a fair bit more in depth than most VR games, which often tend to be extremely simplistic escape room games or wave shooters. It feels like a full game in and of itself, even if it's a relatively short one. It's a very solid PSVR title to play while sitting down and well worth the lows it often drops to on sale.

 

CURRENT BACKLOG - Under Construction!

Spoiler

NOW PLAYING & MORE:

 

NOW PLAYING:

Evil Dead: The Game

Beat Saber

QUBE 2

Beat Blaster

Shadow Point

 

ON HOLD:

Orcs Must Die

Subnautica

Destiny 2

Manifold Garden

Songbird Symphony

 

PLANNING TO PLAY SOON:

 

THE BACKLOG PROPER:

 

RECENT ADDITIONS (After August 2022)

Prodeus

Marsupilami Hoobadventure

Megaquarium

Mini Motor Racing X

Mythic Ocean

Mundaun

NeonHat

Operation Warcade

Paradise Killer

Powerslave Exhumed

Pathologic 2

Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan

Return of the Obra Dinn

Saturday Morning RPG

Shadow Legend

Sniper Elite VR

Super Daryl Deluxe

The Walking Dead Onslaught

Time Carnage

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles

Wind Wind

Winds & Leaves

 

2022 STRAGGLERS (Before August 2022)

Far Cry 6

Hero Land

Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales

 

THE BEFORE TIMES (Before 2022)

Rogue Legacy

 

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