Scorn (XSX Game Pass)

This years' most divisive game probably. What is not divisive is how the game looks- the art and animations and mood are spot on. I'd add this to games like Mirror's Edge in achieving pretty much the perfect blend of art style and what the developer is trying to achieve- merged with where we currently stand with graphics technology. On Xbox it ran as well as can be expected.

I like games with interpretive or philosophical stories- the games or even books and movies where you go online and find people writing essays on what it all means- and they may be right or wrong. It's just another reason why Dark Souls is so good. Scorn is already causing this sort of player interaction online. I got to the end and thought "yes, we won! we did what had to be done". Then go online and find that most people think the protagonist lost. I think the protagonist, the real original protagonist, won a great victory. It depends upon who you are.

The only issue I really have with this game doesn't really apply to me because I used Game Pass. But given the length of the experience (5-6 hours or more if you have trouble with the puzzles) I think the asking price doesn't reflect great value. But that's for the purchaser to decide, not a reviewer.

Halo: Reach. Yeah, this was pretty good! Not that ODST was a bad game, but it felt very much like a B-side project, "Halo Goes Acoustic" or something. This one feels big and very much on par with the main series. It's a prequel that leads into the original game, but they avoid a lot of prequel problems in that it's mostly just telling a story about a Spartan squad and then it's right at the end when they reveal what it's leading to. It's not like you meet Master Chief's family or run into young Sgt. Johnson or learn Chips Dubbo's backstory or whatever.

Even by Halo standards, this is nonstop action. The story lacks the sense of thrust that Halo campaigns have, but that's mostly because the story is about a colossal, planet-wide battle, so you're just constantly running and shooting and explosions are going off everywhere all the time. The only section where it really dipped for me were a couple of late levels in which you spend most of the time piloting vehicles. The Wing Commander-ish space battle in particular felt like the game getting out of its comfort zone a bit too much but at least it was relatively brief. Bungie definitely went out of the series on a high note.

Backbone, Oct 19 (Xbox Game Pass)-I'm not quite sure what to make of this. I rather liked the first half that was a gritty, noir mystery. I think the second half fell apart when it started getting sci-fi. And when it ended I felt like there should have been another hour or so of gameplay. So to summarize what I liked I quite liked and what I didn't was mostly just weird and felt out of place compared to the rest. So maybe there are just two half games here that don't really fit together.

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Halo 4. Playing this one reminded me of what happened to Marvel's various comics after Jack Kirby left the company - Stan Lee would stay on scripting and they'd bring on talented artists like John Buscema to replace Kirby, and they did some nice work and clearly tried hard but none of them had the same spark and the books went from bold, creative storytelling to just sort of keeping the wheels spinning. Here's Galactus...again! The vision just wasn't there anymore. So this isn't a bad game at all, and it's really a perfectly decent Halo game, but it's just not quite as good as what came before.

For some reason, you're still fighting Covenant guys, although at least the Brutes aren't there. Whose bright idea was it to have them stop speaking English? The grunts' screaming was always one of the most entertaining parts of the games. Then it introduces some new enemies, which is great, but the new enemies aren't as interesting to fight. Shoot the dog things in the head, kill the flying geeks so they can't resurrect anyone, then just charge straight at the big guys shooting and maybe nail them with a melee strike to finish them off. By the end of the game, instead of fearing them more, I was kind of disrespecting them, running through them even when my shields were down. These guys also have their own new lineup of weapons, but disappointingly those weapons are basically just alternate versions of the human/Covenant weapons - pistol, shotgun, full automatic, sniper rifle, etc.

I liked the big monster truck setpiece, and the new mech vehicle was a lot of fun. The section late in the game where you do a sort of Star Wars trench run in the dropship was a nice way to do something like the big warthog escapes but just a bit different.

The game's pacing felt a bit off and I started getting fatigued around level 8 or so. For the story, I felt that the game made an understanding choice in dealing with the Forerunners, but the way they presented it and the villain wasn't very engaging and it felt like the story was crawling up the backstory's ass a bit too much (looking at the following two games from afar, it seems like this gets worse later...). It lost the sense of mystery that the original had. The Cortana rampancy aspect of the story was well-done, but as heartfelt as it was, I think it comes across as a bit of a stunt to distract from the weaknesses in the rest of the game. When you got nothing else, knock off a popular supporting character.

The fifth game isn't even on PC and I'm no particular hurry to play the sixth one, so I'm done with Halo for now. It was nice to revisit the ones I'd played before and play the ones new to me. Hopefully they'll finally get the franchise back on track because I do enjoy its flavor.

The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker (2017) (Linux/Wine)

Finished. Try to beat me – I've got "Epic Justice Fail" "achievement"! :D

All in all, I liked this game. As I've written before: I was intrigued by the game at first. And the system of "free text questions" was also smart. The game is really well-made. It's a difficult idea of gameplay and I think it's really well done. However at some point it become tiring for me. You realize that some expected questions you've actually asked, but a bit other way, which means incorrect, which means with no result. That caused I've started to use drop-down list in questions window. At this point the game was not frustrating anymore, it loses some of it's charm for sure, but it's still not a bad one and may be enjoyed. I hoped for some more spectacular ending, but I'm still satisfied with the one I've got.

List of all games completed in 2022.

Tomb Raider - 2013

Was really fun. but man. lara gets kicked around too much. it was like torture porn at times.

found all tombs and all documents and gps and relics but not 100 percent. 15h too to beat it.

One of the games I finished this year was Xenogears. I'm accustomed to choose a game to play without reading too much about it. In this case, I briefly read people praising the game's story and music. Well, the music is great and the story is very cool and complex, but... I DID NOT KNOW THE GAME WAS LEFT UNFINISHED. The first disc is awesome, but the second one was a total letdown. I felt a mixture of anger and sadness with all that endless slideshow stuff. It's almost unbelievable that the big players at Square(soft) approved this game to be released like that. With more time, money and a more professional and mature staff behind it, I believe this game would've been a masterpiece.

I just finished Slay the Spire with each of the 4 playable characters. The game is alright, but I find that it overstays its welcome, given its roguelike nature, the difficult balance (or the lack thereof), and the short-ish gameplay loop that makes the game repetitive after a while. In the end, I lost my patience and installed a mod that makes the game save in JSON format, instead of that non-human-readable hash format, so that I could finish the game quicker.

The Guest (2016) (Linux/Wine)

One-dollar experience – it's exactly what you can get these days for one dollar ;) At first the game is quite intriguing, it starts like an quite climatic escape room with good puzzles. But it's too short (it'd be okay for me) and too shallow. Bathroom puzzle is madness, no idea where are the clues for this one inside the game. And the ending is very disappointing IMO.

List of all games completed in 2022.

A Plague Tale: Requiem (XSX Game Pass)

Just like the first game, this is one of those totally scripted linear game movies that Sony loves to have its studios churn out. Just this one isn't by Sony that's all. You spend most of your time pushing forward on the left stick and hitting the correct button during micro cut scenes to make something awesome happen that you have little control over. It has plenty of instant fail sequences, it even has the Uncharted style reverse camera escape scenes. Plus, you can never get lost or do anything wrong because your side kicks tell you exactly what to do every step of the way, because I must be an idiot.
Obviously, these are not my favorite game genre- yet I do really enjoy some of them just the same. Trying to figure out why I like Guardians of the Galaxy or even Uncharted, and not A Plague Tale or The Last of Us is the golden question I suppose. I think I like the ones that are fun and have characters with some charm and banter. A Plague Tale has some of the most irritating whiny characters. And that kid still needed a good thrashing just as much in this game as in the first.

The game play had too much instant fail sequences where you have to do exactly what the developer wants or fail. The stealth sequences were tedious due to a protagonist that won't pick up a sword because of some aversion to killing but slaughters countless people with a sling, knives, fire pots and a crossbow. You also protect a person that has killed probably hundreds of thousands of innocents. Finally, you end the game doing exactly what I wanted to do after the first hour of the first game. Forced idiot scripting is my pet bane of gaming.

So not my favorite game, but I'm quite sure that people that love these cinematic linear experiences will love it. The media loves it, but the media does tend to like these types of game.
On the plus side the game looks outstanding and had no crashes of bugs during the entire playthrough.

Yakuza Kiwami, Oct 26 (Xbox Game Pass)-I enjoyed this game quite a bit but I have serious reservations about playing any more of the series. The plot was eh. Kinda predictable and cliche but not the worst The game is far too long for me; I completed 39.58% and it took me 29 hours. I never got good at the combat and mostly just button mashed until I defeated an enemy. The quests are way too repetitive mostly consisting of beating up people. There were also entire minigames and side missions that I mostly ignored because they weren't really interesting to me. And there are way, way too many random combats as you try to walk down the street. Actually that last one is the real deal breaker here.

My favorite parts were the main story portions of fighting dozens enemies in a building to find a final boss of the level. The combat is fun even when you're bad at it as long as you're looking to fight. When you're trying to walk around town completing the few side missions that don't require combat, and you get caught in random fights ever 5 feet it gets old. I did however like the Majima fights. Also, surprisingly good was the car chase sequence.

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The Unfinished Swan

I'm not quite sure what to think. Production values are great - graphics/design and voice-acting (incl. Terry Gilliam) are cool, music is fine, too. The story is ... dunno. There is something of a story, and it always feels kind of nice in the moment, but on the whole it was a bit fragmantary and didn't really seem very deep or emotional or memorable in any other way to me. The gameplay is pretty simplistic, you mostly just walk along more or less linear paths (that you have to uncover), point and click wildly to splash paint or water everywhere to make things happen or appear.

At times it shows promise of turning into a full fledged first person puzzler, but the puzzle part never really takes of. There are a few different game mechanics, but apart from the short and simple finale, you only ever get to use one at a time in each section, and it's pretty obvious what to do most of the time, at least as soon as you've grasped what the new mechanic is about. So there isn't really much puzzling and it's more of a walking simulator. Plus, it's very short, only 3 hours at max to go through the whole game once, just a couple of small levels. And that might not even a bad thing, because I think it would get rather tedious if it was longer, due to way it's designed.

IMO it could have been so much better if the various game mechanics would have been combined and allowed the player to solve actual puzzles. Since that wasn't the case, it felt more like a proof of concept or prototype to me, or a tutorial. A new mechanic gets introduced, you practice how to use them in very obvious ways, and then you're done with it again already, here comes the next one. A bit of a pity, because if the designers' ambition would have been greater than just to present a few neat ideas in a stylish environment, this could have been a really interesting game. Instead, it was kind of an "unfinished swan" in itself (intentionally? who knows).

There is one more thing to it, and that's hunting for collectables (balloons) that you can use to unlock a few optional features (like spalshing paint more rapidly or more precisely). None of the features is required to beat the game and many of them can only be unlocked once you've beaten the game. For that reason, I didn't think it very interesting either. It just isn't much fun to go back to chapters you've beaten already and look for the ballons you've missed, as you always start from the beginning of the level and all your splashed paint is gone, so you really have to replay the levels and can't just roam around freely. You can't even run through the levels as there is no sprint key and you can only ever walk, somewhat slowly. And half of the balloons are quite well hidden and not fun to hunt for in this slow and linear colour* splashing way; not even the balloon detector you can unlock is of much help there. I just did't think it was worth my time to 100% the game and so I decided I was done after going through it once.

(* Well, actually there isn't much colour involved either, it's mostly black and white and blue)

Finished my first playthrough of Atelier Lulua on PS4. I've purchased it few months ago, but never had a chance to play it. Now I spent more than 90 hours with the game and even without a walkthrough, I was able to unlock the true ending and Her Choice trophy. The biggest positive change from previous installments is, that there is no time limit anymore, so you can spend as much time as you need discovering the world. The biggest negative change are the enemies. Even on Normal Difficulty, they have loads of HP, and even with the best weapons synthesized, it takes long time to finish them all off, so at some point the fighting becomes a chore. Story has more depth than original Arland Trilogy, and is satisfying for this kind of game.

Link to all my previous finished games.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Shredder's Revenge, Oct 29 (Xbox Game Pass)-Lot of nostalgia with this one. I remember playing the arcade game as a kid. This one was just as tough because I can never line up or time my attacks correctly. Its fun and fairly short so it never overstayed its welcome.

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