:D That's why I preferred to hang out with peaceful Beli ;)
Yelling Audrey drives me mad. However she's definitely one of the strongest characters in the game, very interesting personality :D

Metro Last Light Redux is similar to previous Metro, same level of linearity, but there are way more in game video sequences with scripted events. First half seems interesting as Russian mentality is different in comparison to Western production, but second half started to bother me, it is too linear with too many scripted disruptions.

I'm enjoying it, sadly it crashed and I'll have to start from the beginning :O
Yas, very enjoyable, but I never managed to complete the last level! Well done!

Well, the Dishonored DLC is arguably less compelling than the main story, so while I haven't given up on finishing them, I have definitely slowed down.

The reason I'm posting is that I did "complete" Soda Quest 2 (RPG idle game, Steam) this week.

In theory the game is inifinite (or at least much farther than I went), but I've passed level 11,500, completed all the achievements, and maxed all the classes to level 50, so I'm calling it "complete." I did not, however unlock any of the game modifications that cost billions of gold.

It's free, but I did spend $4 pretty early on to support the developer, since I'd really enjoyed the first one.

This one has more bells and whistles, and I liked it, but I wouldn't say I looooooved it the way in my mind I remember loving the first. Still, I hadn't played an idle game in a while, and Soda Dungeon 2 is good and has some creative features.

The characters are mostly interesting, and there are some different strategies/group comps to experiment with. The AI is ok, but definitely far from optimal, and the game is pretty up-front about that.

So playing manual will be less time-effective, but will improve your odds of survival or efficient use of mana. You can be as hands-on as you want - but the game does limit the extent to which you can really 'idle' though in several ways.

A group may run independently for a few thousand levels, but when they die, the game stops.

Likewise, there are some rudimentary 'scripting' tools you can use to tell each class how to behave, but if you have a group with two thieves, for example, you can't tell one to use the essence steal and the other to attack, and a few other limitations mean that you can never (at least as far as I can see) really code it to behave exactly the way you would as a player, but you can certainly change it away from the default behavior and emphasize certain skills over others.

You can also accrue credits while offline that let you insta-complete levels, but the credits cap at 1440 floors, which is nice early on, but starts to feel somewhat less valuable the higher you go. Still rewards do scale at higher levels so insta-completing level 10001-11440 will yield more gold/essence and better equipment than insta-completing 1-1440.

All in all, it's a good idle game (and playable completely free) even if you're just an RPG-trope or turn-based combat fan who wants to dabble into a game with idle features.

She Sees Red

An interactive movie or FMV game created in Russia and Kazakhstan.

I thought the movie itself - a (quite violent) thriller - was very well done. Actors and cinematography were great, soundtrack was quite cool as well, and the story-telling was interesting. I liked that you had the choice between the Russian original and English dubbing (which was not as good as he original voices, of course, but quite alright as well) and that you could combine both with a subtitle language of your choice. I only tried English and German subtitles, but while there was the occasional, rare difference in the translations, all in all they seemed to be good and polished, too. If you watch all the scenes in one sitting, I guess it will take something between 30-50 minutes maybe? So it's more like a short or the episode of a TV series than a full blown feature-length movie. But to get the whole story, you'll probably have to watch it more than once.

As a game, it's not so great. The only thing you do is make 50:50 decisions, left option or right option. But if you're prepared for that, it's fine. I do appreciate that they let you skip scenes you've watched before already - unfortunately not every FMV game allows that, which makes replays more tedious -, so that's definitely a plus for this particular title. I still wish you also could jump to specific scenes or save the game, so you don't always have to start the whole movie from scratch in order to explore different possibilities. And there aren't that many true paths either. All in all, you have to make either 7 or 10 decisions, depending on one decision you take halfway through the movie, so that seems to be the most significant choice there, and all others just give you slightly different scenes to watch in which you might or might not learn something new, but they don't really have an effect on the rest of the story. Each of the two branches has two different endings, from what I saw. Anyway, all of that is still fine with me. I got to see all endings within about two hours, and also most of the scenes (53/62 - although I don't have a clue what scenes I could have missed, I suppose they were just very minor variations depending on the combination of decisions you take, like someone commenting on one thing you did or another, on the side).

BUT from a technical point of view, the experience was rather bad. The movie scenes were perfectly fine and smooth in general, but whenever a decision came up and a new scene was loaded for it, there were hiccups on my rig, the images would often lag for a few seconds, freeze or get pixelized, and the decisions itself were time-limited, which might have added a tiny little bit to the tension but was still rather unnecessary, IMO. And when the image froze there was a risk of me missing some of the subtitles or losing time in the decision-making. I think one time, the decision only turned up on screen when the time was almost up already, so it was made for me before I could properly read it. And even when it was available on screen, the mouse could be just a little bit laggy, too, or when I used the gamepad at first, I found out that was no good idea either, because the game wouldn't just register left or right, but keep cycling through both options if you pressed the stick in one direction, so I misclicked there occasionally as well. This sounds a little worse than it actually was, most of the times it worked alright, but it should have worked perfectly all of the times, especially considering this was the only mechanic that even involved the viewer and would justify calling it a game of sorts.

Anyway, I don't regret buying it (on sale) and playing through it, it was quite entertaining as interactive movie with badass characters, but I think as a piece of software it could have been much more polished. My rig meets the minimum and maximum system requirements, and it shouldn't be that hard to make a movie with some interactive buttons run smoothly anyway.

Beat Get Even on PS4 last night. In spite of the comparably meh reviews I had high hopes for this game. For some reason I always liked The Farm 51, even though all their games (NecroVision, Deadfall Adventures, Painkiller HD) turned out to be disappointments. Get Even really seemed like it could be their breakout hit that would put them at least on the same level as Flying Wildhog and People Can Fly (and fans of Painkiller might be aware that all three of these studios, alongside The Astronauts, belong to different "creators of Painkiller"). Well, Get Even wasn't quite that, obviously, but I still hoped it would be one of those games that are almost brilliant masterpieces if it weren't for a few flaws that might not matter to me personally. Sadly that is not the case.

Classifying Get Even is a bit difficult. At first glance the mood and visual style are reminiscent of Stalker - decaying industrial environments and some hints of the supernatural. But, besides similar environments that's not at all it. And quite frankly I wouldn't call Get Even a shooter at all. Yes, it has some shooting and even a shooting-related USP, namely a "corner gun" that can shoot - you guessed it - around corners, but neither is there much shooting in the game nor is it particularly good. The game is a weird mix of a walking simulator, a horror game, a psychological thriller, a techno thriller and yeah, a shooter. I think the game's big problem might in fact be that it tries to be so many things all at once. I doesn't excel at either one of them and the wild mix makes if difficult to "fully experience" either one of them. In a sense it reminds me of Sanitarium where some levels managed to be very captivating individually but worse sections in an entirely different mood and style just dragged those down. It's just difficult to appreciate a morbid insane asylum with psychotic patients when you've just come out of a friendly sterile office environment with perfectly mundane security guards. And the sad truth is that Get Even fails to deliver a single section that is truly captivating on its own.

The story actually justifies this randomness but that doesn't solve the problems of this kind of formula. And well, it's difficult to explain the game's weird conventions or what it's really about without spoiling things. It's probably one of those games that are better the less you know about them but then it's a total crap shoot if you're gonna enjoy it. Briefly put: if you love psychological thrillers and weird fiction, chances are that you're gonna adore this game in spite of the lacklustre execution. The story is at the same time riddled with clichés and has some brilliant ideas - I have mixed feelings about the conclusion which manages to be bold, smart and quite disappointing at the same time.

But how does it play, really? Briefly put, there are two main kinds of intermittently appearing sections in the game. The one part of the game is a bit of a horror game where you mostly just walk around eerie environments with some jump scares - you collect notes and you solve some puzzles. Your main tool in this mode is some badass smartphone with a bunch of gimmicks like a minimap, a UV light and an infrared camera. It reminds me of Condemned and a million indie horror games. It's okay but not great, even by indie horror standards.

Then you have "action sequences" which have stealth gameplay and/or a fair amount of shooting. The stealth gameplay is okay at first and has an interesting feature where you can contextually make objects appear out of thin air, theoretically allowing you to sneak past enemies - over time the enemy setups become ridiculously chaotic and frustrating, however, and it turns out that the objects that you can make appear are just moronically placed and more often than not won't help you at all. But kudos to the devs for letting you see enemies' vision cones on your "phone map" which at least makes the first-person stealth playable. It's generally up to you if you will resort to open combat and if you're gonna use the aforementioned corner gun. The corner gun is admittedly a surprisingly fun and original tool, but generally shooting and combat are crap in this game - remarkably so, given that the studio has a ton of experience with shooters. All in all these sections are mediocre at best, IMO.

Now the thing is that the game instantly says that there are choices and consequences here. That stuff is so utterly cryptic, however, that I didn't really care. An IMO stupid thing is that also in the action sequences there are notes to collect and you're encouraged to replay these sections until you've found all of them - apparently there are rewards for collecting all notes and then finding a specific location in these sequences but I failed to achieve that even once so I most definitely missed out not only on extra guns (which I really didn't need anyway) but I believe also stuff that would affect the ending. Looking for notes is just a shitty activity and the gameplay isn't even remotely good enough that I'd want to replay these sections. I did so twice, failed to get that super reward, and just gave up on this endeavour. And honestly, as curious as I am about how the ending could have changed by replaying the levels - knowing the conclusion I don't see any reason to see a different version of it.

Let's finally talk about the presentation and tech. The game promised super realistic graphics thanks to using photogrammetry so I expected graphics on par with The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (which also used this kind of technology). The outdoor environments look pretty crappy, the indoor environments look kinda realistic but boring and very samey. Sometimes scanned actors appear in the game but only in frozen poses. The effect is kinda cool and it's a bit like looking at a 3D photograph but it certainly doesn't make the game look good overall. And for whatever reason the game performs really badly on the PS4 Pro. The game looks meh and yet the console goes really loud and still struggles to deliver stable 30 FPS. But the game does some really interesting stuff with the audio. Some of the sound design choices are downright bizarre but over time you notice that the game often creates fascinating soundscapes, sometimes by mixing looped ambient sounds with the generally really good music. Also this stuff is a bit of hit and miss but when it works it's really impressive and I want to see more such stuff in video games.

In summary: Get Even is ironically very uneven (I thought of this pun last night, haha). There are a few strokes of genius but all in all it's a very mediocre game. If you love psychological thrillers with cryptic visions and such you just might end up enjoying it a lot but odds are that you will be put off by the game's many flaws.

DiRT 5 (Xbox Series X)

While I had a lot of fun with it, it is in many ways a downgrade from previous mainline DiRT-games. The driving feels a lot more arcadey and less simulation, and you quickly get the feel that the tracks are being recycled a few times too many. The option to set up endurance races is also gone. But.. as I mentioned earlier, it's still a lot of fun if you enjoy racing games.

The track editor will help a lot with the game's longevity as well. It also has a pretty good soundtrack, a Donut Media podcast with good banter, and the graphics are stunning. It's really obvious it was made to show off the horsepower of the new console generation, with the weather often changing from clear sunny day to full nighttime snowstorm in the course of a 5 minute race. I found that it could often be hard to see where the road goes when there's so many effects on screen, especially in the night races. I drove off course many times because of this.

The biggest disappointment for me is that there's very few traditional rally races. The vast majority of races in the career mode are with big "slow" 4WD trucks. You can of course tailor your own races in free play, but it kind of feels like untapped potential to race Chevy pickups in the career mode while you could be drifting through the forest in WRXs and Lancer Evos.

Thanks for the review.

Guard Duty

I feel kind of bad for panning this, as it's clear that this is a labour of love and an impressive accomplishment seeing that it seems to be mostly a one-man project (with some help), but I just did not really enjoy it enough to recommend it. It has quite a few things going for it: The pixel art, while not highly professional, is still quite nice to look at and fun, the music is fine, the voiceovers are a bit hit or miss, some aren't that great, but the voice actor for the main character (I believe it's the dev himself) does an excellent job most of the times and comes close to the games that seem to have inspired this - mainly Discworld and Simon the Sorcerer, I'd say (with some nods to LucasArts games and the Blackwell series, as well as some cyberpunk settings - or maybe Metal Gear Solid?).

Sadly, I found the humour and writing not really on par with those classics. They got a mild smile out of me now and then but very rarely. More often than not it felt like either a cheap shot / fourth wall breaking gag, or potential for a joke that was never coming, quirky situations but overshadowed by too much talking, reminiscent of those merchant biographies you have to listen to in RPGs where a lot of words actually amount to nothing memorable and relevant to the game and could just as well have been skipped, which is what I caught myself doing more and more in the course of the game (well, I didn't actually skip any of the text but skimmed through it and clicked it away before the voiceover lines were finished, which I'm not usually in the habit of doing). And the puzzle design was uneven. There was the occasional puzzle that I did not figure out immediately (thankfully nothing obscure enough to require a walkthrough), but most puzzles were very simple, and at times the game actually felt like it was playing itself, especially in the last part, lots of talking and cutscenes, hardly any meaningful player interaction, and with the longwindedness of it all that was rather boring. The story wasn't really spectacular either and did not make a lot of sense to me.

It's by no means a bad game, and some adventure game aficionados might like it all the same, but it doesn't really do anything particularly well either, IMO (apart from the main character's voice acting maybe). I completed it in 6-7 hours, but I took my time and probably left it running while being shortly distracted, too, so I guess the average player would finish it more quickly.

Little Misfortune

All in all, I quite enjoyed it. I was a little surprised at first to learn that it's not a full point-and-click adventure like their first game, Fran Bow, but an "interactive story" with some choices instead. But even with that limited gameplay of just going around and clicking on things, it was entertaining enough to carry for the whole 3+ hours or so it took me to complete it. The art, the music and sound design, the voice-acting and the story-telling were all top notch.

Dialogue writing and humour were quite good as well, for the most part, even though some things were a little too much on the nose for me, forcefully sad, tasteless or gross just for its own sake, there were also some slight inconsistencies in the little girl's supposed ignorance and innocence, and combined with the super cutesy voice mimicked by an adult (the artist herself) this came across as somewhat creepy in itself sometimes (it made me a bit uncomfortable occasionally, no idea whether that was intentional or an unfortunate side effect - it does have horror themes after all, but I mean the different kind of creepy). Also, I could imagine some players being really put off by this cutesy voice act (with an accent, on top of it), but I kind of liked it. The plot itself wasn't all that new and special for a horror themed 'walking simulator' (not sure if I would call it a horror game proper) - maybe a bit too similar to Fran Bow as well? -, but it was well done, and the little details surrounding it made it memorable regardless.

I'm not quite sure whether the story is supposed to take place around 1993, which was the date on a newspaper lying around - of course it could have been decade old trash or a figment of the imagination, but for what purpose? - and yet there were chats on a computer or the voice talking about "googling" something, without the girl wondering about it, so it can't really have been in the 90s. But that's just a little nitpicking on my part, minor observations, and not really that relevant. Maybe I misunderstood or drew some wrong conclusions.

Despite being rather thorough, apparently I missed some things in my playthrough - maybe due to the hotspots only being visible and interactive when you're standing next to them, and even then you can stand just a tiny bit too close or far away, which was a bit awkward. And other stuff - regarding the choices - you can only experience in a second playthrough (or if you save regularly to play through scenes twice; but there are only three save slots). I don't think I will replay the game for that though; despite its short length there would be just too much repetition, and it's comparatively slow, with enough unskippable scenes or animations that - while fun the first time - would turn the whole thing into a chore on a replay. Maybe I'll look up the differences on YouTube instead.

Last Year (2020)


Current Play List
2D Action - Overhead/Isometric: Monaco
2D Action - Side: Deadlight: Director's Cut
2D Action - Side Force Scroll: Satazius
3D Action Adventure: American McGee's Grimm
Adventure: SC2VN - The eSports Visual Novel
Fighting: Super ComboMan: Smash Edition
FPS: Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders - Episode One: City of the Damned
FPSRPG: Dead Space
Open World: Bully: Scholarship Edition
Puzzle: Hanono Puzzle
Racing: Stunt Rally
RPG - 3D: The Witcher
RPG - Isometric: IceWind Dale
RPG - Japanese: Soul Blazer (SNES)
RPG - Turn Based: Geneforge
RPG - Other: Bardbarian
Sports: Shufflepuck Cantina Deluxe
Strategy - Grand Strat: New Day: Cataclysm
Strategy - RTS: Sacrifice
Strategy - TBS: Attack of the Earthlings
Vehicle Combat: Steel Storm: Burning Retribution

Completed This Year
2021-01-31 Super Toy Cars
2021-01-31 Nitronic Rush (Story Mode)
2021-04-30 Dear Ester: Landmark Edition (With Developer's Commentary On)
2021-07-06 The Eye of the Beholder (with All Seeing Eye)
2021-11-07 Kingdom: Classic (no permadeath)
2021-11-28 Prince of Persia - The Sands of Time (XBox)
2021-11-28 Fear in Hospital

Super Toy Cars

Well.. I thought this was going to be a janky 3D Micro Machines clone and it surprised me! It's actually a janky Mario Kart clone! Getting randomly embedded in some walls instead of bouncing off can be annoying and I found at least one track where there's points where you put your wheels over the white lines and it randomly things you've gone a mile out of bounds and recovers you!
At least there's a good variety of courses and challenge types, It's good, knock about fun for a limited time but it ends before it gets too tiresome at least!

Nitonic Rush (Story Mode)

After finishing that racing game I decided to look at this free one - Nitronic Rush and blasted through it's main story mode in half an hour! It's a very pretty game especially for a student project that was built from the ground up using no off the shelf engine at all! It's a flying, wall running, car parkour time attack type affair, but while the things you find yourself asking your car do and the obstacles they put in your way are all rather exciting it's all rather easy as, as far as I can tell, they haven't implemented a fail state! You never run out of tries and the only incentives for super quick runs or high trick scores is bragging rights on the online leader boards, it seems
Still as I say, it's an 'experimental; student project that you can download for free so mustn't grumble
They appear to have developed it into a full commercial game / spiritual successor called 'Distance' so.. that might be worth checking out!

Project Speed

LOL what even IS this?:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1201940/Project_Speed/
Some kind of free mouse and keyboard controlled car game that is, apparently out of 'Early Access' even though it's clearly in the most early pre-pre-alpha state possible!
You.. get to drive yellow truck on 3 or 4 different maps that are like driving on ice with te3xtures that mess with your eyes and start to look like they're going backwards, as there's no real aim I didn't think I could ever call it 'completed' but then I noticed it had Steam achievements -
1 - Play more that 1 min (!)
2 - Get up the undocumented, hilariously bad 'mini map' (SPOILERS - Press 'm')
3 - Drive over to and then up a gentle incline on the 'Hill Climb' map
4 - "You took a swim" achieved by driving into a small pond on the 'Mountains' map (and not, as I first assumed, into the sea on the 'Islands map)

and that's IT! But.. I got all 4, 100% perfect game so I'm calling it!
Quite breathtakingly awful - makes Digital Homicide look like Bioware, although at least these guys don't have the gall to try to charge hard owned cash for their... output!
The only mystery is HOW this paper thin jank manages to take up 8Gb of hard drive space and make my computer sound like it's about to take off while it's running!

Yakuza 3 (XSX Game Pass)

So the Yakuza Remastered versions of 3, 4 and 5 have come to Xbox after all- with a port of 6 coming later this month as well. No way am I going to play all of them back to back, but for now I've finished 3. You can immediately tell it's an older PS3 game even though it's remastered- compared to the remade Kiwami games. Still it looks okay and runs well.
The combat is more of a letdown on this older game than the graphics actually. The series has always had an annoying tendency for enemies to go immediately into blocking stances the minute you try to land any damage on them. But this time the bosses take it to an extreme and I found little way to break their blocks except constantly trying to dodge away and get a single hit from the side- after which they immediately go back into blocking stance. It makes the fights feel 10 times longer and they become nothing more than exercises in health drink chugging to outlast the bosses health bar.
There's only one thing I despise more than a blocker and that's a runner. Unfortunately Yakuza 3 brought those in too. Quite a few bosses make a run for it and make you chase them through hideously annoying chase sequences.

So mechanically the game shows it's age compared to Yakuza 0 and Kiwami. But if you enjoy the characters and story of the first three games, then this is still pretty good for that reason. And at least you get a new area, though a small one, to play some of the game in as well as the usual Tokyo area. I'll take a break now and come back to the remainder of the series through the year.