Be Excellent To Each Other

1. Trine 4 (PC)

Better than the tripe that was trine 3.

1) Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (Xbox)

Castlevania without the name. It’s good but I swear there’s some lag or something in there because it never felt “snappy” enough for a twitch action platformer. I got both endings but I needed to resort to a guide just to push me along the true ending cause I’d lost the patience to search out certain things. 7/10

Thanks Dave. I knew *you* wouldn’t let me down

I had to finish something first! Can’t be making be making garbage threads willy-nilly.

1. Faraway: Galactic Escape: more Android puzzley goodness from Snapbreak.
2. Last Day of June: 'cheery' indie puzzler in which your wife dies and you get crippled in the first ten minutes of the game. You're later gifted the ability to play through that day as the various other townspeople to try and change the circumstances of the crash because it turns out they all contributed. Um, or could have. Depending on stuff. I suppose?

Never gets massively complex but I did get stuck at one point because I had to do something mildly counter-intuitive (i.e. 'break' the solution to an earlier section in order to unlock something else, plus get an alternative solution to the broken thing) but aside from that it was pretty straightforward.

Overall, interesting enough stuff but it could do with some streamlining; each playthrough of a person's day takes a very short amount of time once you've done the first one, but you still need to sit through an annoying cinematic and some setup stuff every fucking time which ends up discouraging experimentation with the timelines. Given that's essentially the point of the game it's annoying they didn't think to give you a bloody 'skip' option.

Also, the characters never speak but just make appropriate noises which gets a little irritating over time, especially the kid's giggle which gifted me the unique experience of desperately wishing for the ability to punch a sound in the face.

1. Titanfall 2 - Poor WarBot

Good, innit?

1. Little Nightmares (Switch)

Runny jumpy sneaky puzzler-platformer-horror. I liked it a lot.

On track for 52!

3. Manifold Gardens: PC puzzler with a couple of gimmicks separating it from the pack of 'place coloured block on switch' sort of things.

First up is the ability to switch gravity (almost) at will. Each gravity direction has an associated colour and blocks can only be interacted with when gravity is pointed in the way associated with their colour. This results in puzzles wherein you can 'lock' a block in place by switching gravity away from it's colour and thus using it as a platform or way to lock another block in place. The whole thing also makes navigating the levels more interesting as you can generally just switch gravity around and walk up walls/ceilings to get where you want to go.

The next and much more interesting aspect of the game is that each level repeats; often in all directions at once. So say you're on a platform and you want to get to the one above you. Oftentimes the easiest way to do this is just to drop off the one you're standing on and plummet down; you'll fall through the level and as you go it'll repeat so that what was above you is now below you and you can land on it. This generally work sideways as well as you can just flip gravity 90 degrees and fall down to what was previously over to the side. It's one of those things that's really difficult to describe but incredibly simple in practice.

It also gets a bit more interesting when the concept of water is introduced. You'll often need to get a flow of water to a specific place and you need to leverage that fact that when the stream falls off a platform edge it'll eventually end up reappearing somewhere else at the same level (because everything repeats, remember?). This means puzzles where you need to really looks at the vertical layout of the level as it interacts with itself and there'll generally be a 'eureka' moment when you line everything up.

None of this is to say that it's a particularly difficult game at heart and the devs have certainly shown restraint in not making the impossibly fiendish puzzles they could've done. Indeed most of the time I found myself struggling was just with finding the stuff I need in the mad layouts. Ultimately everything begins from finding the trees that sprout the blocks you need, and a few times I burned time just not noticing one sitting on an edge I hadn't explored. Nothing's really hidden as such, it's just sometimes difficult to know where you have and haven't been because unlike a 'normal' game all surfaces in all directions at each level are fair game.

The gameplay aside it's a fucking triumph of presentation. The sharp-edged graphical style suits the infinitely repeating levels perfectly and in parts it looks like an architects blueprints come to life. The only thing I've seen that looks similar is that other head-fucking puzzle game Antichamber but this is so much more impressive in my opinion. The sound design is also a lovely minimalist affair with just your footsteps and some subtle musical themes accompanying your navigation of these impossible alien spaces. Also the ending is ten minutes of some of the trippiest fucking shit I've ever seen in my life and feels like a proper genuine reward for finishing it; something that's not very common these days it made me realise.

It's definitely a little bit of a 'design over substance' because the gameplay isn't quite as gripping as the visuals are beautiful, but it's got enough original and interesting stuff going on that I'd recommend it as a package. And frankly the look and feel of it's almost worth the entry price alone.

4. Krystopia: A Puzzle Journey: Android puzzler that I suspect is aping the Faraway games but with a smaller amount of longer levels rather than much more plentiful bite-sized challenges that the Faraway games go in for. Things start of pretty easy but the difficulty ramped up a good chunk for the fourth and final level, to the point that I'm still not sure how I was supposed to work out the solution to two of the puzzles. Overall decent stuff although the laser-based puzzles--which are otherwise the most satisfying aspect--were pretty fiddly to interact with.

2. Little Nightmares: The Kid DLC (Switch)

I'm going to count it as it lasts as long as the main game. As soon as I got near the end I guessed what was coming up, but Christ - what a fantastic, fantastic ending. What a great little game this is.

One more off my backlog..

Luigi's Mansion 3 - This was great and full of charm. I finished it in 13 hours and 31 minutes according to the in game timer. My only criticism (and it a small one) is that sometimes the perspective was a bit weird when working out where you were and where you had to go. Still, I enjoyed it. I might go back to the first one now and see how that holds up.

1. Trine 4 (PC)
2. The Witness (PC)

The Shitness more like.Extraordinarily pretty, but the puzzles rather blew. Felt like something of a never ending chore in a world which promised much more.

2) The Division 2 (Xbox) - 8/10

It’s the seminal Ubisoft looter shooter.

Looting: not that intrusive at all. I took a weapon that was 8 levels below my current weapon and it still slapped.

Shooting: really solid. The normal enemies aren’t spongy at all (which was my biggest worry) and sure the bigger guys soak up bullets but a box of lead can make short work of most guys. I felt it was a bit easy and was disappointed I couldn’t jack up the difficulty (since it’s all based on your level), but the campaign isn’t that long and the post-game is much harder.

Graphics: Fucking beautiful. A desolate Washington DC looks fan-yabba-dabba-tas-good. Why do the artists spend so much time and effort making these great environments and then we walk by them in seconds without giving two shits? Crazy.

Sound: Good. Bullets could be meatier but I was happy enough.

Story: I wasn’t listening.

Post-Game: so you complete the game and then a bunch of hard nuts rock up and have to clean the map up again but with harder guys who have robot dogs and suicide drones. I gotta say it’s been fun doing the post-game; you do the same missions but with way more guys and harder guys in it. You get specialisms, more dark zone, gear score over levels and a bunch of shit I’ve not even fully acquainted myself with. It seems quite interesting. I might even do a raid. Can you believe I’ve never done a raid. Has anyone done a raid ever? Fuck is that all about aye? Who’s got time for raids, hmmm?

Disclaimer: played the game entirely in coop. No one in their right mind would play this game on their lonesome. Get some friends (it’s been reet cheap lately) and have a blast.

1. Trine 4 (PC)
2. The Witness (PC)
3. Sunless Skies (PC)

Got the wealth ending. Verrr. wealthy, me.

Much more forgiving than sunless seas (I only died once in skies, many, many times in seas)... Not sure if that's a good thing from my perspective, but probably for others. End was a little grindy, but generally enjoyable.

5. My Memory Of Us: puzzle game with stealth elements in which you control a paid of kids as they progress through a world being take over by Nazi-analog robots. Each child has a couple of unique abilities and you need to switch between them to solve certain puzzles but it's all very easy stuff and was only ever 'challenging' when the game required me to use abilities that I'd forgotten even existed because they were so rarely used. It's absolutely nothing to write home about but it looks lovely and was essentially free so I don't regret the time I spent on and off with my Switch playing through it.

3) Horizon: Zero Dawn (PS4) - 6/10

It’s the PlayStation exclusive everyone was raving about! It is good and fighting dinobots is great fun. Unfortunately if you’re following the story you’ll be immensely disappointed with how trite it becomes and how it’s told in the most boring possible way.

3) Horizon: Zero Dawn (DLC - The Frozen Wilds) (PS4) - 7/10

7 hours long to do the main campaign and zero side missions, cause they just weren’t interesting for me. But I liked this! I probably liked it a bit more than the main game since it was more combat focussed. I couldn’t give two shits about the story again. Guerrilla aren’t Naughty Dog. Not even fucking close.

Some thoughts:
* New weapons: new bows, flame thrower and spear. All very yawn
* New robots: just variants on the main game animals to be fair. The scorcher was a tiger thing with a fucking dragon punch move. They were pretty tough to be fair. But the best one...
* New Boss: Singular. It’s a big ape thing. You fight one and it’s pretty satisfying to kill. Then you fight three and it’s a tough ole battle. Then the last boss is just a heavily armoured version and, to be fair, it’s a pretty epic battle and I really enjoyed it.
* New Environments: the frozen wilds are very good, it’s very pretty but Deaths Stranding and God of War smashes it for snowy goodness. The internal bits of the volcano aren’t very good though: just metal box arenas. Oh and the fucking god awful platforming? Just no. It was shit and boring. Thankfully there isn’t that much but it’s still too much.
* Story: No idea, mate. Bland as fuck.

It needed some more exciting animals but it was a pretty decent romp. It you enjoyed the combat in the main game you’ll probably get your kicks out of this but if you’re invested in the story first then I can’t help you; you’re just a boring cunt that doesn’t know good dialogue if it told you to fuggeddaboutit. Or something.

1. Luigis Mansion 3
2. Far Cry 5 - I played this entirely in Co op with a friend and we enjoyed it. It was quite easy and the ending is a bit bobbins but I am looking forward to playing New Dawn so it didn't wear me out entirely.

Also, I'm on track to finish 12 games this year! Exciting times.

6. Polyescape: escape room thing for Android with a low-poly art style (hence the name I assume). Each level is themed differently and all of them involved logical puzzles and satisfying interactions so definitely one of the better examples of the genre and I'm looking forward to the sequel now as well.

5) Ghost Recon: Breakpoint (DLC - The Terminator) - 3/10

The game’s a broken mess still but this was pretty fun. Very short only a couple of hours spent doing the story missions and eliminating all the Terminators in the side missions.

3. The Capcom Beat em up bundle - I've completed all the games and got all the achievements so yeah, I think this counts.

4. Streets of Rage 2 - part of the Megadrive collection on the Switch. I've never completed it before... Good fun.

3. Alien Vs Predator (Arcade)

The old beat 'em up game. Fucking hard toward the end, but still great fun. The bosses stretch the idea of "what if Alien, but this?" to the limit and I love how insane they get.

6) The Surge 2 (PS4) - 6/10

I wrote this about The Surge



Well turns out the exact same things could be said about The Surge 2 with one exception: it now has screen tearing and textures frequently take a while to pop in! Yay!

The level designs are great though; how they loop around and stuff but the environments just aren’t that interesting looking and has some crap blocky pologonnally looks. That’s probably how you say that. Oh the boss fights are good though but the average enemies are mainly just blokes in gear. Lots of the same blokes with different weapons. Again and again and again.

So yeah, still good but the devs haven’t meaningfully progressed beyond the first game. Which was a good step up from the crap that was The Fallen or whatever it was called. The one that MrDave absolutely loves. Shame the Surge 2 isn’t though, in some ways it’s probably a step backwards. It’s got a hint of the reduced budget about it.

NEEEEEEERRRRRDDDDD

7. Polyescape 2: more of the same from the sequel which is a very good thing.

5. House of the Dead Overkill - Wii - I bought this when it first came out I think and played it a fair bit. I didn't realise that I was only a couple of levels off completing it so, after having an urge to play it, I've gone back to it and finished it off. It's a light gun game with lots of swearing. It's alright if you like that kind of thing.

I've got the magnum controllers for that game! Loved it.

This is the one I used. It's great although the rubber on the handle is a little sticky now.

Typing of the Dead:Overkill on Steam is a great version of the game, which is sadly very broken now and pretty much only seems to work on Intel PCs using onboard graphics.

Yeah, I've got a pair of those guns.

1. Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune Remastered (PS4)

Yes, it’s showing its age, and yes, some of the endless enemy arenas get tiresome, but it was still a fun romp. Looking forward to the next one!

1. Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune Remastered (PS4)
2. Star Wars: Battlefront II (PC)

The latest one. Dumb fun, much like the new film. Painfully linear in places (frequent “return to the mission area” countdowns), but shooting stormtroopers doesn’t get old.

The story could have been much more interesting if it had continued as it started though.

6. Sniper Elite 4 - I completed this in Co op. Skipped all the story so didn't have a clue what was going on but that doesn't matter. You basically shoot people from miles away. It's great fun.

Sort of, I find you shoot 1 person from miles away and then hide behind a low wall for 30 minutes.

7) BioShock 2 (DLC - Minervas Den) (PS4) - 6/10

I found BioShock 2 incredibly dull at the time but revisiting the world years later I had a really good time. The combat is a bit unforgiving and a wonky - turrets see you if you show them a pixel; enemy gunfire is surprisingly quiet; there’s not much in the way of visual cues of being hit until you’re at low health; health melts off you etc - and there’s the age old problems - scratting about in bins for items which descends into just clicking X over everything, items aren’t highlighted so there’s no visual assistance especially since the game is super dark (I had to max out the brightness to play it) and items can sometimes be invisible in the darkness; and despite some areas activating a light on your suit you can’t turn it on yourself - and the arenas aren’t as good as BioShock 1 - you enter rooms and clear them out of baddies in a shoot out with few chances of setting up traps beforehand or moving around the arena to setup before you start a fight.

But despite these little gripes it’s still fun to get a possé of flying drones and go fuck shit up; turn drones against enemies; lead fights into bottlenecks where hacked turrets lie in wait; crash into rooms with swarms of bees and open both barrels of a shotgun into a splicers face hole as he’s being stung; set guys on fire with a click of your fingers; gather up guys in a mini black hole and set them on fire and then send in the bees to add insult to injury and so on. Some of the plasmids effects overlap and it could have done with some more experimental ones perhaps a la Dishonored but with a limited runtime there was still lots to mess around with that I’d forgot about.

There’s a story but I’m ashamed to say I didn’t follow it very well. It’s got a twist at the end but it was kinda dulled by not listening that closely to what was going on.

Still, it’s on PS+ at the minute and it’s well worth dipping back into the world if you’re like me and missed both the DLC upon release. FYI only BioShock 2 & Infinite has DLC and is accessed immediately through the Extras menu so you don’t have to complete the full game. Thank fuck.

8. The White Door: a spin-off of sorts from the excellent Rusty Lake series of pointy-click-escape games. The puzzles and general gameplay aren't maybe as challenging as those of the main series but it absolutely retains the wonderfully macabre dreamlike atmosphere which is one of their main selling points. It brings a cleaner version of their aesthetic to the party plus satisfyingly kinetic interactions that really sold the entire thing. There's also apparently a secret level which shades into ARG territory in that it apparently required people to phone a real phone line then hack apart a website and dig up actual stuff in locations all over the real world. Obviously I can't be bothered getting into that but I love the dedication required to set it all up (and to enjoy the main game you don't even need to know it all exists). All in all a joy to play and good to see the studio experiment while also keeping up their usual quality level.

8 ) Bioshock Infinite (DLC - buried at Sea Episode 1) (PS4) - 3/10

The episode ends when you fight a big daddy in a large arena straight from the streets of Columbia. The fight is infinitely (hah) worse than the exciting Big Daddy fights of Bioshock 1 & 2 which sums this DLC up pretty well. There’s a twist (again) which is shit.

9) Bioshock Infinite (DLC - buried at Sea Episode 2) (PS4) - 7/10

Much, much, better! For a start, it’s back to health packs! Yay! But still no Eve packs! Boo. Fuck knows why you can’t stack eve since, once again, I’ve barely got any eve throughout to use the plasmids. Mind you, you only 4 plasmids this time and one of them (which lets you see enemies through walls and their state of awareness) barely uses any eve at all, which is great.

Hang on, an enemies state of awareness? Yes, because it’s now a stealth game and you have to sneak around stealth killing folks or firing tranqs into their face using a crossbow. The stealth is really, really forgiving (read: not fully formed) though and you can stealth kill guys from the front if they’re on amber alert. It’s easy enough not to piss you off on normal difficulty and Liz was soon taking out entire rooms of people with little difficulty. You’ve also got a few guns but the ammo is very sparse and, hell, Liz can only carry a few rounds for each weapon.

Yup, you’re Liz and you’ve shed your rip tearing abilities to become a real girl. It loosely follows on from episode 1 but it’s really it’s own story: a story of how Rapture got into the state it did in Bioshock 1. I thought it would be smarter in the way it retells the start of Bioshock 1 but it’s a bit forced (and unnecessary) yet it still manages to stay interesting through the reasonably lengthy runtime (4 hours or so I’d say).

And I’ll say this about this new Rapture, it’s much better than episode 1. It seems tighter, more focussed, looks more like Rapture, even feels more Rapture-like, has a lockpicking mini game (although you still need to savage for hairpins, not once was I ever without enough pins) oh and even an alarm if you fuck it up with a barrage of gunfire from a drone. Shame there was never a bot shutdown station nearby even if you couldn’t interact with it.

After the crap that was episode 1 I’m amazed I had a good time at all but this was a really good edition.

Oh and there’s an unsettling scene where your player gets a lobotomy. It was so horrible that I was getting a bit anxiety in real life. I’d play it just to get to that bit. Mind you, you kinda need to play episode 2 to end the franchise too. I’m glad I can now say I’ve done the lot. Good stuff.

7.Robocop - Gameboy. This was rock hard but really quite enjoyable. For a tiny handheld game, it was quite close to the arcade machine in the way it played. The first couple of levels were a bit dull but it soon picked up after those so yeah, a good 'un!

Let’s not forget this beauty!

Of course, I forgot to mention that the music in this game is absolutely brilliant. Somw of the best I've ever heard from the Gameboy.

Satsuma! That's incredible!

I can't recall ever seeing that before, but somehow it seems eerily familiar. Went to read up on what is undoubtedly an ace-best advert and found its inspiration, this incredible Polish art-house film along the same lines. Made the same year I was born, cripes comrade!

9. Trick Art Dungeon: 'puzzle' game for Android which initially draws you in with a genuinely high level of visual presentation and the promise of Superliminal style perspective fuckery. Sadly though after the first actually impressive such trick the rest of it's runtime involved the developers forgetting to put any game in their game. The puzzles are hilariously trivial and the perspective shifting is never elevated past 'rarely deployed gimmick'. The fact that you're constantly forced to sit through a load of asinine dialogue is just the final nail in the coffin here. A shame because there's a load of potential in the general visuals and the perspective based stuff, there's just nothing in here worth experiencing that stuff for.

10) Sea Salt (Xbox) - 8/10

You’re a Lovecraftian horror living in the sea, just chilling, like, but get a bit annoyed when your subjects on the land who worship you like a god start to get a bit up themselves or something. So you send in swarms of nasties from the deep to give them a good kicking and prove you’re still the boss.

The controls are dead simple: You move your all seeing eye, which your swarms of monsters follow, and press the trigger to make your army attack. Stop attacking by, y’know, not pressing the trigger. That’s your lot. It’s kinda like a simple RTS. The graphics are, hnnngh, pixel art but get the job done. Sound is mainly just people screaming after being bitten on the face by crabs, or eaten by slugs, or melted by your cultists. There’s a branching map with lots of replay value. It’s simple but, more importantly, it’s fun. Who wouldn’t want an army that consists of dozens of that girl from The Ring? It’s on Game Pass and you should play it.

How long did it take you to complete it?

4-5 hours perhaps? It’s not very long.