Goodbye Deponia, Jan 11 (GOG)-More of the same in Deponia which depending how you feel could be good or bad. For me Rufus has started to overstay his welcome. He's still a massive selfish, insensitive, oblivious jackass and its starting to get old. Some of the puzzles were a little strange too or maybe I was just getting impatient. The mini games were hit or miss. I did like it when Rufus cloned himself and you had three characters to control. Other than that there wasn't much going on for me. Not really looking forward to the conclusion at this point but there was a little hint of character development at the end so maybe hope isn't entirely lost.

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Sakura Agent
Bleh, one more and I am done with this stupid bundle. I thought it will be easy picking considering how short they are but it took me several years to get rid of it as I am always very unwilling to start next one. At this point (honestly since the beginning) the games are just trying to outdo themselves which one will be dumber than the others.
Better to not say more and rather forget it.
2,5/10

First I figured I'm not gonna spam this thread with games made in Dreams but then I thought "hey, those guys who make and actually finish their games in Dreams also deserve some love!" So lemme briefly talk about two Dream creations that I beat a few days ago.

The first one I beat was Lonesome Town. It's basically a visual novel that tells the story of former detective Simon Trickett who's struggling with insomnia after his wife (or girlfriend, don't remember) was murdered and the killer is still on the loose. He receives treatment to deal with the sleeplessness which also makes him experience weird visions of past events. It's a pretty amateurish psychological thriller - the writing is riddled with clichés and the voice acting ranges from meh to absolutely terrible and surprisingly often does not fit the captions at all. Yet I enjoyed it an odd lot and the conclusion was honestly pretty good! On one hand the graphics are mediocre, on the other hand the rough minimalistic look kinda works well with the game's noir nightmare mood. The music is pretty good. There isn't really any gameplay to speak of - while Simon is awake he walks around in 2D and can talk to people, meanwhile the visions are a typical first-person walking simulator. Not great, not terrible. Anyway, I respect the effort that went into this and that the game is genuinely complete and tells a decent story.

Full walkthrough

The second one I beat was Pip Gemwalker. This one's apparently super popular in the Dreams community as it has been played over 170k times and has received 50k thumbs ups. It's also pretty much the exact opposite of Lonesome Town as it's just a basic 3D maze game but in its simplicity kinda does everything right. You just walk around as a sloth, have to dig up hidden gems and make it to the exit. You can climb ladders, scratch walls to find gems and soon also throw a wooden disc and get a robot side kick that can destroy certain walls. It's very short and basic but it's kinda "perfect" and with more content it would easily be worthy of a commercial release. Its clean colourful visuals are a joy to look at and the soundtrack creates the cutest and most heart-warming mood. I enjoyed the game a lot and really respect it for what it does!

Full walkthrough

Include me

2020 List

Games Finished in 2021
1. Littlewood
2. Escape Goat
3. Spiritfarer
4: Pheonix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies
5. The Night of the Rabbit
6. Cat Quest 2
7. Obduction
8. River City Girls
9. Puzzle Agent
10: Puzzle Agent 2
11. Secret Files: Tunguska
12. Ys
13. Dust: An Elysian Tail
14: Secret Files 2: Puritas Cordis
15: Secret Files 3
16. Secret Files: Sam Peters
17. Finding Paradise
18. Symphonia
19: Kirby Triple Deluxe
20. The Last Campfire
21. Xenoblade Chronicles 2
22. Cthulu Saves Christmas
23. Forgotton Anne

Hoping to finish some more backlog games on GOG this year, and going back to my PS4/other consoles, specifically to finish Tales of Vesperia and Horizon Zero Dawn. Want to finish more Switch and 3DS/DS games this year too. I'll be editing my 2020 list after this because I realized I forgot to add a 3DS title I finished. Might try doing some retro games this year too, like Earthbound or OG Dragon Quest. I'll be adding games here very soon, probably by the weekend.

Note: Well I likely won't be finishing any more games as I'm spending my last week of the year with GW2 and Animal Crossing, and won't be finishing Legend of Mana just yet (game I'm currently playing through on stream). Xenoblade 2 was my longest game I played this year, though overall I probably sunk more hours into GW2 and Animal Crossing, but those go across the entire year and are continuous in that I keep playing them to relax ( both are great games for my anxiety). I think my favorite out of this list is Xenoblade for story, River City Girls for gameplay, though I also loved Littlewood and Spiritfarer gets an honorable mention.

My first finished game in 2021 is Tales of Zestiria – The Strength of a Knight DLC on my PS4. Pretty quick run this time. Just went for all of the treasure chest, remaining trophies and some fusing and Lord of the Land Blessing upgrades.

All my games finished since 2015 can be found >>>HERE<<< ;)

Switch: Yonder The Cloud Catcher Chronicles. Exploration, trading, crafting, quests... very enjoyable if you like that type of game. I'm still hoping for a Fantasy Life on the Switch though.

Just finished Timespinner.

Had a lot of fun with it, has a good story, good pixel art, good gameplay.

I do wish it had a world map that was a bit more complex and a little less pallet swap enemies, specially between eras.

Overall, a great experience! :D

Just beat Dishonored: The Brigmore Witches and thus I'm done with the first Dishonored. I'll save everybody some time and not go over the same issues again that I've had with the base game and first story DLC. I still don't like Dishonored (though I still have hopes for Dishonored 2) and The Brigmore Witches did very little to change that BUT I think it's my favourite part of Dishonored so far.

What I did not expect is that this DLC is a direct sequel to the previous DLC, putting you in the shoes of Daud again. I especially did not expect that if you have a saved game from The Knife of Dunwall you can actually kinda import your saved game - at the very least you can pick which ending you want to continue from IF you have unlocked those in the previous DLC. I guess that's kinda cool?

The Brigmore Witches has a much better story than The Knife of Dunwall. I mean, arguably it's just the second part of the same story but this part is certainly more interesting. You start out with a personal quest, you have a nemesis, the stakes are high and it ties nicely into the base game's main plot - it's still a kinda unnecessary side story but at least it has a more direct connection to the events from Dishonored. The Brigmore Witches also undoes the complaints I had about Daud's personality (even retroactively for the previous DLC), though I still feel that the game fails to sell him as an exceptionally experienced assassin and leader.

Even though I don't really like Dishonored I must admit that both story DLCs are high quality content that will surely satisfy (almost) anyone who has enjoyed the base game. I respect that and wish that more games had story DLC of this calibre.

A Mortician's Tale, Jan 15 (Itch)-Eh it wasn't really for me. Everything felt very heavy handed. Also, it bothers me when narrative games have so many typos.

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So, it's a bit of a douchey move to say that I "beat" a (very) short arcade game designed for many replays by just beating it once (on the lowest difficulty at that) but, well, I just beat Nex Machina on rookie difficulty - a twin-stick shooter by Housemarque. This was probably the first Housmarque game I've played since the mid-90s on Amiga. Crazy!

Admittedly the days where I could pour hundreds of hours into a single short arcade game and just replay the same levels for no reason other than to get better and achieve higher scores have been over for many years. So, on one hand I just gotta admit that Nex Machina just isn't meant for me - on the other maybe in this day and age it's okay to expect a bit more from a game like this? It's not like there aren't other arcade games / shoot 'em ups that manage to tie this kind of gameplay into something bigger and provide more than 30 minutes of level content? But, oh well, I'm not gonna complain as there's clearly a hardcore fandom for Housemarque's games that is perfectly satisfied with this format.

And honestly, I can see why. It's a very tightly designed and utterly gorgeous twin stick shooter. It's a very basic game that doesn't really do anything that we haven't known for over thirty years. You just move from arena to arena and destroy crowds of robots while saving some humans - you pick up power ups, different types of secondary weapon and of course you die from a single hit (or two if you have a shield). But the execution is just mind-blowingly good.

First off, the presentation is utterly gorgeous and beating the game is like an intense drug trip with colourful particles everywhere and brutal synthwave soundtrack. Even something like switching "levels" (I'd rather call them "arenas") and getting moved to the next challenge has orgasmic qualities here. And you got to hand it to the developers: it's quite amazing that they managed to still keep the game highly readable and allow you to avoid the sometimes hundreds of projectiles on the screen with perfect precision. And the gameplay itself is also super solid. Visually the enemy types aren't too imaginative (in the heat of battle you perceive them as little more than red boxes anyway, though) but mechanically they are very diverse and each type makes perfect sense. You also get really nice boss battles, of course. I've seen reviews that say that this is one of the best arcade style action games ever made and I think those guys may be right.

That said, especially once I moved on to a higher difficulty level I had a few concerns. With games like these I don't tend to blame the game but a red light went off when I noticed that every single death I got on a higher difficulty level was caused by me just not seeing something. One time I got hit by bullet that I just didn't see at all, another time I got stuck on a wall that looked like floor to me, another time I collided with an enemy because there was briefly a "cinematic" camera that made it hard to read the level and yet another time I died because the cooldown bars are awfully placed and hard to see. So even though the game's UX is tight for a shmup with 3D graphics and particles all over the screen I feel that it's still a far cry from more traditional 2D shmups in terms of readability and am a bit disappointed that they didn't address this stuff in patches.

Still, I can see myself returning to this game a lot. Even though it's ultimately just a basic arcade game with VERY little actual content it does have various meta progress bars and online leaderboards and so on and I'm pretty sure there's a somewhat secret sixth world that I haven't seen yet, so those things give me a bit of motivation to play this some more. And honestly, if you happen to enjoy those basic but hardcore action games that you kinda just play to get better at them (o to just let off some steam) this has got to be an amazing choice.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey (XSX)

I played the base game on PC when it came out because it was bundled with a new GPU. But I always wanted to come back to it a few years later with all the season pass content. It's done, after almost 4 weeks of full on game play with just some breaks to play Hexen II in the middle. I basically ignored the random generated billboard quests, as they are nothing more than dull padding- useful early on to level more quickly though. I did all story missions, side missions, hunted all Cultists, became the number one mercenary, did the same for all season pas expansions and ended it all at level 83. And got all 93 achievements. I think the total play time was something like 150 hours. I loved it more than the basic play through i did previously. I like the how the main story quest is actually three separate parts that you can do in any order as you see fit- deal with your dysfunctional family, hunt down and end the Cult of Kosmos, defeat all the legendary beasts to find Atlantis.
I played as Kassandra. If Adam Jensen and 47 are my favorite male lead characters then Kassandra is the best female. A beast of a woman that genuinely looks like she can fight, and well voiced with a cynical sort of humor.
I still believe that it also has one of the best combat systems for an action RPG- way better than Skyrim! A good balance between brutal melee, stealth and ranged styles.

Secrets of Greece

The first part of the DLC is nothing more than a big collection of side missions that are a bit longer than other side content. They occur all over Greece and become available at many points in the story, including post game as closure as you travel around the map saying final farewells to some of the major characters during the adventure.

Secrets of the First Blade

A three part expansion that fleshes out some more personal aspects of your character, plus an entirely new Cult to hunt down. Uncovering and hunting the Cultists is actually one of my favorite parts of the game, so this DLC was quite good, though it was very slow to get going.

The Fate of Atlantis

This one was a huge DLC that could have been released as a standalone game. It takes part in three totally new areas representing simulations of Greek mythology- Elysium which bring you up against Persephone, The Underworld and Hades and finishes up in Atlantis. Elysium especially was stunning and one of the most vertical maps I've ever played in a game.

Whilst i'm glad this huge game is now over as i can finally play something else, I did not regret a minute of it.

Just beat Ruiner on PS4. After "beating" Nex Machina yesterday I felt like playing something in the same vein but with a bit more substance - with a story, some progression and so on. So, the funny thing is that Ruiner does have those things that Nex Machina lacks but kinda sucks at everything that Nex Machina does have. Also, incidentally both games came out at almost the same time.

I was under the impression that Ruiner was one of those games that scored super high with reviewers but fared badly commercially. It's basically how two colleagues of mine - who are super fanboys of this game - laid things out to me. After playing the game for about ten minutes I felt that something's off and actually checked some reviews. The Metascore's 75. Yeah, that sounds more appropriate.

First off, though: Ruiner is aesthetically an absolute masterpiece. It has a distinct and in my opinion gorgeous style that pays tribute to manga / anime - as far as I can tell more to Akira than anything else. And it has a mindblowingly good soundtrack which sounds like something between Burial and Lorne with a hint of the Akira soundtrack. The game looks and sounds fantastic. Surprisingly it even has decent cutscenes, even though actual dialogue is only delivered through text boxes without any voice overs. And to be honest the lack of voice overs - besides some hellish voices played in-game - is the one thing that makes this game feel a bit low budget. Well, besides the fact that it's a goddamn twin-stick shooter.

Sadly the aesthetic genius does not extend into the gameplay. I'm not a total arcade game aficionado but I've surely poured a few hundred hours into shoot 'em ups and run 'n' gun games and I can say with some confidence that this is not a very good twin-stick shooter, starting with the fact that the actual twin-stick controls are utterly and totally borked. By the time I reached the last couple of levels I kinda finally got the hang of the aiming but it's certainly no thanks to the unresponsiveness, an awkward camera angle, awful auto aim and an aim sight that I couldn't see on a 50" TV. I imagine that on PC you have a reticule that reacts instantly to your mouse movements but the lack of such a responsive element in the console version's UI is a terrible oversight.

Not that it matters much because this muddy aiming fits the muddy gameplay. Ruiner is not a game that requires or supports much precision. The screen is hard to read, you inevitably take a lot of hits but you also constantly get to replenish your health. There's apparently a ton of enemy types but it doesn't really matter what you're up against except a few suicide bombers, the same "tactics" work against everything else. It took me a moment to figure out how you really have to play this game. During the first hour or so I died a bunch of times but then I just started mashing the "dash" button and suddenly the game became shockingly easy and I got only a handful more deaths, most of them during a bossfight that can apparently only be survived by equipping a shield that makes you temporarily invulnerable - I don't think there's any other way to survive this fight which is kinda awful in a game where you build your character in an RPG-ish manner (but luckily you can respec at no cost at any moment).

I kept thinking that I'm not playing this game right, that there's something to master here. I did not rack up many kill combos but most of the time you really can't because enemies spawn so slowly that your combo just runs out before the next ones appear. I only used a few abilities that seemed sensible to me, I kept getting hit a lot, with the awful aiming and bullet spongy enemies I felt that the encounters took a lot longer than they should - but I kept racking up S and S+ ratings sooo I guess there really isn't much more to the game? And frankly it baffles me that many reviewers complained about the game being too hard, one of them insisting that it's "hard for the sake of being hard". Well, on normal it's a piece of cake to anyone who has played other twin-stick shooters and has learned to spam dashes. I'm sure I'd get my ass handed to me on higher difficulty levels but the game just isn't interesting enough for me to want to try those (unlike Nex Machina which I want to give another go now).

And as I said, I barely distinguished the enemy types because it really doesn't matter. Also the levels are all very samey, there's just two or three types of bossfights that get recycled all the time. Thank God there's a bit of an intriguing story with kinda interesting characters which kept me going but when you finally reach the ending it turns out that the writing suffers from the same issue of form over substance as the gameplay. And to be honest the further I got the more I felt like this is just a cyberpunk remix of Hotline Miami. Perhaps I missed something here but the game doesn't give me much of a reason to care. Oh yeah, and between the actual levels you get a small hub world with nothing meaningful to do and one of the most confusing quest log's I have ever seen.

Now don't get me wrong, there's a ton to love here. As I said, aesthetically it's a masterpiece and it's generally a very cool experience (if criminally short - I think I beat it in four hours?). I just expected a LOT more from the gameplay which doesn't get close to actually good or even just average shoot 'em ups. But even though the gameplay isn't good per se, the ridiculously good presentation still makes the game highly enjoyable and I'm genuinely happy that I played this one.

Full Throttle Remastered (XSX Game Pass)

Thought I'd play though this quickly to see if it's how I remember it. Yes it's how I remember it. Just like most LucasArts adventure games it's full puzzles that sometimes are obtuse or just plain terrible. But at least this one doesn't try too hard to be funny and is stronger for that. I always felt the Monkey Island games in particular are just not funny, they have a low grade low common denominator sort of humor like American sitcoms...you know the ones with a recorded laughing audience in the background to make sure you know when to laugh. So Whilst I do like Full Throttle better than most LucasArts adventures, that's not saying much.
It is however short, and was an easy 1000 Xbox Gamer Score in another month where achievements equals reward points....so I already have another month of free Game Pass to take it almost to the end of the year.

This was my main criticism of it. I wanted to like it but ultimately I just end up going back to play Robotron or Smash TV again.