ResetEra 52 Games Challenge - 2022
#1 Unpacking (Xbox Series X|S)
First game of 2022! I can see why this made so many lists in 2021. It’s fairly simple and relaxing and straightforward. I did hit a snag around the middle when it wanted me to place a specific photo in a specific spot and after several minutes of banging my head against a wall and switching rooms I finally caved and looked up the solution (it was a photo of an ex and you had to store it out of sight) and that’s when the game introduced specificity of where you place things. I did NOT like that, but otherwise the game is enjoyable and relaxing. 4 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 4 hours Date Complete: January 3, 2022
#2 A Short Hike (PS4/PS5)
A nice and short, very relaxing game about a small bird named Claire that goes with her Aunt May on vacation to an island. I enjoyed how open this small little island is to explore and how each and every NPC you meet has their own dialogue and quests. Not gonna lie, I teared up a bit once I got to the summit of the mountain and Claire and her mother had the conversation on the phone; reminded me of when my mother was still alive. 5 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 1 hour Date Complete: January 4, 2022
#3 Foreclosed (PS4/PS5)
Another mediocre cyberpunk styled graphic novel about a rather terrifying future where everyone is wired into the blockchain and has an identity debt. One man is part of an experiment by a shady "business" woman that tries to take him off the blockchain / grid and enhance his implants illegaly. I don't know, the story was a bit hard to follow and even if you chose different dialogue options, that didn't lock you out from learning things about the story that you shouldn't have. The voice acting is either mediocre or just straight up bad. I love the art style and the comic book like story panels that happen from time to time, the music was nice too.
The leveling and cybernetic implant upgrade trees are very shallow to the point that it might as well not even be in the game.
The checkpoints in this game are ASS along with the gun targeting. Even after changing the targeting values to make it less floaty there was no difference and because of this, I died a lot more often than I should have. It was obvious that the game wants you to focus less on gunplay and more on using your cybernetics.
Glad I didn't buy a physical like I had originally planned. 3 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 5 hours Date Complete: January 10, 2022
#4 Halo Infinite (Xbox Series X|S)
Its been a long time since I’ve played a Halo game, probably not since Xbox 360 and Halo Reach and Halo ODST. More or less burned out and disinterested in the franchise after those two were finished. I’ve never touched 4 or 5 because, as far as I was concerned, the series and story ended for me after part 3 and Master Chief and Cortana went to sleep in that capsule. I thought after all this time I was ready for a new Halo game. I thought Halo combined with open world would be a shoe in, can’t fail type of game.
Ultimately for me it came across as mediocre and not really an open world game since some areas are gated off by story progression. Also, story wise, I was both bored and totally lost since I haven’t played 4 or 5. I didn’t feel like anything that happened had much weight to it until the pilot confessed that he was a civilian contractor and not a Marine. His emotional breakdown was pretty much the only thing that really resonated with me. Master Chief and his relationship with the A.I. girl felt undercooked and his loss of Cortana’s presence did bother me somewhat since he was his friend and closest companion through the first three games. Even the main antagonists felt more or less like a joke and their sole purpose was to move the plot. I honestly felt more emotion when any of the NPC Marines would inevitably get killed (and yes Chris R. if you ever read this that is because of you.)
All in all I feel like this entry in the series was pretty mediocre. It was nice playing with all the old UNSC and Covenant weapons again and seeing everything and everyone with a fresh coat of paint, but it didn’t grab me like I thought it would. It really felt like an Ubisoft open world game with a Halo skin on it. If this is the way Halo is going to be shipped for the next 10 years then I think I’m probably going to bow out and leave it for the hardcore fans and continue to live with the memories of Halo of old. 3 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 22 Hours Date Complete: January 17, 2022
#5 Alwa’s Legacy (PS4/PS5)
Alwa’s Legacy is a not very good Metroidvania about a girl named Zoe who comes to the land of Alwa from another world to save it from the clutches of an evil wizard named Vicar.
The writing is funny in some parts and not flushed out enough in others, ultimately making the whole thing forgettable. I felt like the powers were so-so for the most part and strayed too far from the standard Metroidvania faire of ‘double jump’ and ‘more attack power’ and instead bogs down the flow of the game by making you backtrack and redistribute points to access powers you actually need to progress.
I absolutely hate the way movement feels in this game. Zoe’s ability to jump and move is very stiff and the lack of her ability to swim is ridiculous. The final boss battle was an anti-climactic, under written disappointment. The bosses in each dungeon were better developed and more entertaining. It was almost as if the devs knew that at this point in the game they had worn out their welcome. I will absolutely never go for the pacifist run of this game either.
I also was not a fan of the way secret percentages for each zone were tied to whether or not you had turned each save point in a zone into a warp point which led to an unnecessary amount of backtracking and making me feel like I had missed a power or something somewhere. The only reason I discovered this was the case was getting frustrated trying to find items and doing a Google search and finding out the userbase on Steam had figured out the problem. A hint that this was the way the game worked would have been nice.
A few things that I did love about the game were the art style and music; I felt both were superb in their execution. I also liked on the end screen after the credits were totals showing your fractions for finding collectibles in the game and your overall secret percentage (mine was 90% but I doubt I’ll go back and go for 100%) and, almost as if they were reading my mind when trying to implement a death counter for my livestreams, they kept a running total of my deaths through out the game (106). 3 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 13 Hours Date Complete: January 18, 2022
#6 Mask of Mists (PS4/PS5)
Very easy first person dungeon crawler where you are set on a task to find the missing Archmage who went looking for the Mask of Mists. For the most part the design of the game is very easy but there is a lot of backtracking involved with solving the puzzles in the game. Your goal is to find 6 crystals and activate them to be able to enter the final dungeon of the game where you have the option of either rescuing the Archmage or leaving him to his fate and taking the Mask of Mists for yourself. Each of the 6 crystal dungeons are fairly easy to get into and navigate, each one reminding me of old first person RPGs I played long ago. Also managed to 100% the game and snag the platinum! Fairly relaxing, my only negatives are all the backtracking and the sluggishness of combat. 3 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 5 Hours Date Complete: January 23, 2022
#7 Dragon Quest Builders (PS4/PS5)
Bit of a long one here so strap in. At its core, DQB is a parody of Minecraft with a JRPG skin on it. You play as a mysterious, unnamed hero that mouths off to the god that brought you life and gifts you with the power to build. The game very much mocks most JRPG story conventions and instead focuses on the building aspect of the game. A bit too much dialogue for my taste at times, but it does a nice job telling the story and making you wonder who is right and who isn’t. The story is told over the course of 4 chapters, each one ending with a unique boss battle that pits you against a comically large version of one of the game’s monsters and makes you fight them for the survival of your city or base that you’ve been building up over the course of that chapter. You’re judged, while building, on how you make a room and how you decorate, each room earning a score based on contents of the room and how it’s decorated.
Each chapter gets progressively harder as you go along, with 1 being fairly easy and 4 being outright painful. A few brief notes on the chapters:
The Hades Condor fight at the end of chapter 2 is complete bullshit.
Chapter 3 starts out very difficult and maintains a sharp difficulty spike. Also the 3 guys you have to find/rescue are very homoerotic.
Speaking again of chapter 3, I managed to kill the boss with NO DAMAGE to my base. That fight was particularly weird, having to ram the boss with a car.
The day/night cycle of chapter 4 runs *way* too fast in my opinion. My other complaint about chapter 4 is, while I understand that it’s done to set the mood and aesthetic of the chapter and what’s happening story wise, the environment is WAY TOO DARK EVEN DURING THE DAY. Also, everyone’s “hesitation” about you being the hero of legend and letting you save the world - after all the work you’ve put into getting this far - is completely ridiculous.
The final boss fight was a lot of fun.
Briefly dabbled in Terra Incognita, this game’s version of Minecraft’s creative mode. I could get addicted to it for sure but I doubt I’ll play more as unlocking things in it requires beating all the challenges in each of the game’s 4 chapters and I don’t like being rushed. I did not try the online mode of Terra Incognita as I wasn’t interested. Also while dabbling in Terra Incognita it dawned on me as it started to rain that the weather effects in the game were practically nonexistent. Disappointing.
The end of chapter “report card” with all that chapter’s challenges listed was a surprise, and an unwelcome one. I didn’t realize that I was playing each chapter on a sort of time limit (they track how many in game days it takes you to complete a chapter) so there are 4 trophies for this game that I’ll never get.
I made a fatal mistake during chapter 4. I made about 3 to 4 hours of progress in the chapter when, out of nowhere, an exploding rock enemy just rolls right into my base (in this case, the ruins of a castle) and explodes…shortly followed by a second one. Normally I am able to kill them with a hammer, but I didn’t have one crafted yet. I sat there in horror and irritation for a second and thought ‘I’m not fixing all that shit’ and loaded my save file. To my horror, I hadn’t saved my progress in hours and was terribly set back several quest steps. I nearly quit, but I’ve come back from worse situations. I did take the opportunity to rebuild the castle somewhat before re-doing the quest steps I had lost.
There’s no consistency between chapters. A material dropped by a specific enemy in one chapter may (and will) be dropped by a different enemy in another.
Had I not known about you losing everything when a new chapter starts I might have ragequit. Still kind of pisses me off a little. This is one of the very few times that a spoiler from a podcast was actually helpful to me.
All in all, I had a good time with the game. Scratched that RPG itch I’ve been having and the ‘I need to create something’ feel. I enjoyed the game, but I do have my complaints. The music is great (even if it was written by that bad man) but after so many hours of the same tune repeating on a loop it becomes grating so I ended up muting it most of the time and putting something else on in the background. Not being able to build over water is dumb. Having to use teleporters to move from landmass to landmass is somewhat confusing. It would be nice to deconstruct things to get raw materials back, but then again Minecraft doesn’t do this, so I guess it’s a moot point. It’s stupid that trees won’t grow outside the city barrier. It’s not like they’re not getting light and nourishment just because the land is cursed. But speaking of the curse, when it gets dark at night in the game, it gets dark. Like, holy shit, how am I supposed to see? At least Minecraft gives you the moon so you can see at night. Inventory system is nitpicky; having to switch tabs just to deposit items in the bank is frustrating/irritating. And watch out for those cursor jumps when you switch tabs or you’ll deposit things you didn’t mean to. The bot pathing in the game is very messy and at times highly irritating. And why do the NPCs insist on jumping up on walls to access other rooms instead of using doors? Kind of strange that it creates a new save for each chapter, I guess so that people can jump in each chapter at random if they like to complete challenges? It’s very unfair and highly annoying that the small ghost enemies can just teleport into your base at night, despite all the defenses you’ve built. The fact you don’t have access to every recipe in every chapter is both confusing and stupid.
And now for my two BIGGEST complaints about this game: ranged attack weapons and the nonexistent quest log.
Ranged attack weapons don’t appear until chapter 3 (end of 2 if you count that fight against the Hades Condor) and even then all you really get are magic “bullets” made from fire and ice and trying to accurately hit the enemy with then is a lesson in frustration. Again, not that I’m trying to compare it with Minecraft at every level, at least in that game you can use a bow. You could give players a bow, spears, endless throwing stars. Something other than what is present would be a welcome change.
And where is my damn quest log? I get it, part of the fun of the game is exploring the world and seeing what you can find…but you could still give us a quest log. Maybe mark secret things you find out in the world in the log as a ‘secret quest’? I can’t remember the number of times I would forget what I was doing (due to open world game ADHD) and having to go back to base and talk to the quest givers over and over. Right hand or left hand side of the screen, maybe just a few bullet points on screen. Also, with regards to quests, doing quest steps ahead of time should not make you have to sit through all that quest dialogue but it happens every single time.
I’m looking forward to playing the sequel and may do so before year’s end. 4 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 97 Hours Date Complete: February 8, 2022
#8 Kena: Bridge of Spirits (PS5)
I had such high hopes for this game. The previews made it look like it was going to be an amazing, mind blowing experience. The story opens as Kena is wandering through some unnamed and unknown forest, the tutorial zone for the game. Along the way you learn to traverse the world and how to look for the game’s secrets/hidden items in the form of blue crystals (the game’s currency), cosmetic hats for the Rot (more on them later), and how to find more Rot to add to your arsenal. The Rot are small Furby like creatures that are exceptionally cute and are used to interact with the world and fight your enemies.
It’s sort of an open world adventure game (but mostly it’s linear) with a few branches here and there to give you some illusion of choice in where you’re going. The level of detail through out the world is superb: small leaves floating on the water, wood grain on all the houses/buildings, tiny wind chimes hanging everywhere, paper lanterns all about the village, etc. The music is very fitting and a joy to listen to as you walk about the world looking at this and that. But that’s about where the good in this game ends; it’s beauty is most certainly only skin deep. While the world is a pleasure to traverse and look at, it feels very empty and lonely even though the village (the game’s central hub more or less) looks and feels very lived in. I’m not sure if that was a design choice but it’s both a good and bad one for me.
The story is told in a confusing way where different perspectives from NPCs all lead to the same event: the destruction of the mountain shrine. The village in the game, which is the central hub of the world, sits below a massive mountain and is nestled between a forest and a huge open field where the villagers grow food and hunt animals. All life in the area comes from the mountain shrine where the Rot god (which looks like a giant cat covered in vines of a sort) lives. Toshi - the leader of the people of the village - goes to the Rot god and kills it and when it dies it kills everyone in the village in a huge cataclysmic event that is told from different perspectives of the NPCs you meet along the way. He kills it because people are dying and the village elder suggests that everyone pack up and leave the village behind and move elsewhere to live but Toshi doesn’t want to do that; he loves the village where it is. It’s also told in a very confusing and out of order fashion (in media res perhaps, but there’s no real action going on when Kena arrives on the scene). Absolutely nothing is explained when the game begins, it’s just Kena coming out of nowhere (tutorial zone) and heading to the village to begin ferrying the dead to the afterlife. At least that’s what I interpret the story as. I would probably have been more sympathetic toward the people and their plight (and the fact that they’re all dead) if I wasn’t so confused along the way. Sidebar: Toshi’s voice absolutely does not match his character model.
The load times for this game are a little ridiculous for it being a PS5 game. I’m not sure what happened but at this stage of the console cycles this shouldn’t be a thing.
When a cutscene in this game is triggered, it’s pretty jarring how much different it looks versus the actual game. It’s almost like we’re re-living the PS1 era with pre-rendered scenes and animated character models.
The upgrade/tech tree is kind of a joke. I had most of it completed during the first section of the game. Getting it to 100% and not missing out on any skills took very little effort. Honestly some of them should have just been gimmies anyway (like multi arrows and bombs).
And for the elephant in the room, combat and the camera in this game is absolutely the fucking worst. Nothing really ruins the flow like getting hit by some asshole that’s off screen or getting your ass handed to you again and again by an enemy (looking at you lesbian blacksmith from the second area) that doesn’t give a shit that you’re trying to dodge roll or parry. I hate game that force you to use parrying as a way to combat foes. If you don’t learn to parry bosses in the game (and other heavy hitter enemies) then you’re never going to be good enough to beat the game on any difficulty higher than easy. Trying to dodge roll was, for me, a total waste of effort most of the time because I still got hit no matter when I did it during an enemy’s attack animation.
It’s obvious that the environments and to a certain degree the puzzles got the most love and attention when this game was developed and that combat was more or less an afterthought. The difference between ‘easy’ and ‘normal’ difficulty is that sometimes during combat in easy mode, enemies - bosses included - will just stand there and take whatever punishment you dish out. Normal difficulty they will fight back to the point that it’s almost unfair. I did lower the difficulty to easy after getting trounced by the second boss several times just so I could finish the game and move on. Once I encountered Toshi’s part of the story with a boss guarding each of his relics and the final fight with the Rot god I’m glad I didn’t subject myself to that. 2.5 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 10 hours Date Complete: February 13, 2022
#9 Dragon Quest Builders 2 (PS4/PS5)
I loved the first game so much I decided to give this a whirl after a disappointing stint playing Hollow Knight (stuck at the end) and dabbling a little in Assassin’s Creed Origins to see whether or not I’d like it enough to stick with it through to the end (spoiler: I didn’t…at this time). Got a lot to say about this game, so let’s get started.
First off, let’s talk about the quality of life changes:
You gain levels this time! This is a nice way to make up for your character’s weakness in battle. Too bad there’s a 10 level cap per chapter in this game. Being able to run is a nice change of pace, but there’s a stamina meter. I hate stamina meters but at least it refills quickly.
Using the glove tool to pick up and move stuff without having to “break” it first is awesome and helps with speeding up decorating and building.
The hunger meter was changed to a % which I think is a good thing. I can judge when to eat a lot better with a number than a meter.
Weapon and tool degradation is gone.
A whole lot more space this time around in your inventory (I never once ran out of room), but makes the Colossal Coffer obsolete and pointless to build.
There are a lot more NPCs this time around and I love it. There’s a seemingly near endless supply of them that you can bring back from the randomly generated islands you can travel to for resources and inspiration.
Naviglobes are now fast travel points which makes navigating the world so much easier and faster than the first game.
YOU CAN FLY! This was a big surprise and a very much welcome change as I feared I’d be stuck using teleporters like the first game to get from land mass to land mass. Also a lot of fun as flying doesn’t require stamina to stay aloft (looking at you Breath of the Wild).
The music is more of the same as the first game, but still (mostly) pleasant to listen to. The majority of my game time was spent listening to podcasts or YouTube videos instead.
Having Malroth help you gather things is a nice change.
Happy to see the big muscle bull headed dudes are back. Yum yum.
You can equip NPCs with weapons this time, making enemy invasions and boss fights a lot faster and smoother than the first game. If only you could upgrade their armor too.
The mini medal puzzles are awesome and I couldn’t get enough of them.
I like that NPCs come to your base when you ring the bell to level the base up instead of you having to go out and hunt for them all.
And now for a few critiques:
No quest log (again) but quests are sometimes displayed on screen in a checklist, so that’s something I guess? Also, having to go back to the stone tablets to see what needs to be done is a little irksome.
NPC’s don’t build stuff this time? At least not that I noticed. They sure do like to cook and eat though.
The voice that talks to Malroth takes way too long. No amount of hammering on the button advances the dialogue any faster.
Disappointed that you can only have 60 people (or monsters/animals) live on the Island of Awakening. Why should there be a cap when everyone that lives there doesn’t even use all the space even if you build things? Having to pick and choose when you get a new recruit is lame.
Also disappointed that the Island of Awakening is basically divided into 3 separate biomes: grasslands/forest, desert, and snow/ice with a castle. And there seems to be artificial boundaries keeping all the residents in each section of the island which is weird. I built a railroad across the island (as one NPC requested) and it was never used.
It’s really annoying that you can be attacked while in the crafting table menu of the Island as well. There should be a time stop when you can’t see what’s happening in the game.
There is WAY too much talking at times. This isn’t a Mario & Luigi game on 3DS damnit. Oh and while the stylized writing for NPCs to make it seem like they’re talking with an accent is cute and all, after a few minutes it gets very tiresome to try to translate while you’re reading. There were several times I stopped paying attention so I could go do whatever and just get passed the dialogue.
Lulu is supremely fucking annoying.
Leaving your stuff when you switch islands is as much bullshit as it was switching chapters in the first game, but at least this time around when you’re done with the island/chapter you get everything back plus what you’ve managed to pilfer during your time without the rest of your stuff. At least this time it’s somewhat less stupid than the first game but I still hate it.
I do not like the “cooking meter”. Things that were ‘instant’ in the first game are now on a countdown timer. Mostly a non issue until you have a ton of ingredients to cook or a lot of minerals that need to be smelted into bars.
Did I mention that Lulu is fucking annoying? She is, legit, the least favorite character for me in the entire game. Second only to that traitor back on Moonbrooke.
And now, for a few spoiler thoughts on the main story quest:
Your friend Malroth is the Lord of Destruction?! This was a little confusing at first but it turns out that he’s just possessed by a demon of the same name. Very confusing through out the game but made sense at the end when the real Malroth revealed himself.
The Baboon boss from the first island was fun and over the top just like the bosses from the first game. For the most part, bosses in this game weren’t as difficult as the bosses in the first game by any stretch.
The “quest” to get Babs to put on the bunny costume was hella cringeworthy and I hated every minute of it.
The third island - Moonbrooke. I like the castle but the war between the monsters and humans is both confusing and stupid. Also the constant snowfall all over the castle is a little irritating. The people here are annoying and I didn’t want any of them on my island. They also royally pissed me off by partially destroying part of the roof I had built over their castle during one portion of the chapter. Finishing the Moonbrooke chapter to the tune of Roar from Katy Perry was awesome but damn did this chapter drag on forever.
This whole spiel about the world being nothing but an illusion of Hargon’s own making gives me some serious Matrix/simulation theory vibes and it’s a point that they decided to beat like a dead horse.
Not gonna lie, the part with Malhalla and building the Ark had me in tears for a few. It gave me flashbacks of flying to Ultima Thule in Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker. I’m getting a little tired of playing RPGs that have sad endgame scenarios (Endwalker, etc.)
A HUGE improvement over the first game, but not without its faults. 4.5 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 135 Hours Date Complete: March 28, 2022
#10 Metroid Dread (Nintendo Switch)
It’s pretty bad when you’re the progenitor of a genre of games (Metroidvanias to be specific) and you totally suck at doing your job upholding your legacy. Don’t get me wrong, this game wasn’t all bad, but a lot of it wasn’t good either. It feels like they took a long look at Super Metroid and thought “we can just copy that” and tried and missed the mark. The music and sound design is good, what of it I bothered to listen to. After a few minutes of the same tune repeating over and over, it gets old. I also felt like your attacks didn’t hit hard enough in terms of sound; it was often hard to judge if I was even damaging a boss or mini boss at all. The environments are beautiful for the most part - Ferenia being my personal favorite of them all - but something about them seems a little low resolution? Sometimes plant textures appear a little muddy and more often than not I’m too preoccupied with what’s happening in the foreground to even be able to drink in the rich detail of the background leading to a sense of overkill. This also led to the framerate in a few rooms chugging along at a snail’s pace.
I didn’t feel like you got enough time to explore each zone before you’re whisked off to the next one. It felt a bit like being led around by the nose on a near constant basis. The amount of forced paths or “one way” paths is overkill for me. I understand that these are a staple of Metroidvania games but this game does it too much. Exploring felt very rushed until the near end of the game (when you’re allowed to freely wander that is). The fast travel system is a nice take but the limitation behind it (i.e. actually reaching the damn things) makes it kinda pointless in my opinion. It would have been nice if they would take icons off the map once an item (like missile tanks, bomb, etc.) had been collected. As it was, maps were a pretty cluttered mess to look at. And don’t get me started on how the only part of the rooms that you actually walked in would get filled in; that made my OCD fucking scream. Speaking of the map and fast travel system, it is 2022 and there are uncomfortably long loading screens between zones. I know, I know “But Dragon Quest Builders 2 had loading screens!” I can hear you shout at your screen, but at least theirs were entertaining. This is just Samus standing and doing nothing.
I will never understand why the Spider Ball from Metroid II has never been re-used in any other Metroid game, but something that mirrors its function is sometimes present. For example, this game has the Spider Magnet that allows you to cling to and climb blue surfaces in the world. Other times while exploring you’re forced to contend with using Morph Ball Bombs to try to navigate areas and reach Missile Tanks and the like. I feel like they give you your beam weapons a bit fast in this game; I felt like I didn’t have to put in that much work to get any of them. And the Grapple Beam is just as irritating to aim as it was in Super Metroid when swinging through the air. I didn’t feel like there was a lot of weight to Samus as I (rarely) swung from point to point across the ceiling. The most the Grapple Beam got used was to solve puzzles and open doors and not actually swinging from anything.
A lot of the powers in the game felt underutilized to the point that they just seemed pointless. The Flash Shift is only useful a handful of times and mostly when trying to navigate specific hallways; I never once used it during any combat as I never felt the need. Likewise the Cross Bomb ability was equally as pointless as I only (successfully) used it to gather Missile Tanks about three times. I did not like that you have to activate the speed boost in order to get it to work instead of it just being constantly active like in Super Metroid. Also trying to use the Shinespark to reach certain power-ups became such a pain that once I saw it was required I didn’t bother going back to pick them up. I felt like the Diffusion Beam and Wave Beam were more or less the same.
I wasn’t sure that I liked all the missile types being one and the same at first, but for simplicity’s sake I got used to it. I still would rather the Ice Missiles had been a beam weapon like previous games. Also, why do Missile Tanks only give +2 missiles? What happened to +5? It’s not like changing it to +5 would have ever unbalanced the game as I never ran out of missiles until the final boss of the game. I also think it was pretty stupid that I was able to pick up Power Bomb upgrades before I even had the ability unlocked and that the game would even tell me that’s what they were. At first I thought I had broke the sequence of the game. Nope. I thought it was neat that you could pick up Energy Tank fragments - find 4 to make a whole energy tank - but save that shit for Zelda.
The E.M.M.I. are infuriating. Like, how the actual goddamn fuck does this mechanical psychopath magically appear in whatever part of it’s lair I happen to be in? I’m getting ‘Nam flashbacks to Alien Isolation’s Xenomorph spawns because it’s a similar flavor of bullshit. If their patrol routes were a bit more organic and not simply ‘I’m programmed to be annoyingly close to you at all times even if you’ve been super quiet’ then I might not have hated them as much, except for the one under water. I’ll hate that one until the day I die. Killing one of these sons of bitches is quite satisfying and also leads to acquiring some of the series’ iconic powers. Their “chirp” that they make is also highly annoying and when you’re hiding from one while cloaked, the whole camera zoom in thing the game likes to do gets real damn old. It was pretty intense the first two or three times it happened but then it just became an extreme annoyance that often led to more unnecessary deaths. Also the rooms where you gain the power to kill an E.M.M.I., are they supposed to be some sort of tribute to Mother Brain?
And lastly, in terms of gameplay, I don’t like that the game holds your hand by marking a room with a white pulse on the map if something is hidden in it. This feature is especially stupid once you acquire the Pulse Radar. Hunting hidden items is part of the fun of a Metroidvania for me. Give me back the x-ray visor from Super Metroid instead of this garbage.
In terms of story, I find this game somewhat uninteresting. Adam is a condescending dickhead most of the time, outright referring to you as “Lady” during the opening scenes and constantly telling you that “you’re not ready to face Raven Beak” through much of the game. The occasional “cutscene” when you enter a new room or a new zone is nice and all, but after it happens for the Nth time it becomes rather irksome and slows the pacing too much for my liking. The elder you meet halfway through the game is nice but it’s pretty predictable when he gets assassinated since he pretty much tells you what’s going on. And are they for real with this whole ‘Raven Beak is your father’ and ‘you’ve got Metroid DNA in you’ story line? I’ve never really cared what Samus’ origin story is. I don’t need an origin story for every hero/heroine in every game/movie/tv show yet writers seem hell bent on telling us at every opportunity whether we wanted to know or not. Killing your overbearing father is such a cliché at this point; I’d rather they had written it just about any other way.
If it took them this long to create a new 2D Metroid game and this is what we got, I have little hope for Metroid Prime 4 being good. I would say this is a Metroid game in name only as most of the usual trappings aren’t present. 3 out of 5. (Note: game was beaten using no Amiibo advantages and played on Rookie setting.)
Total Play Time: 18 Hours, 44 Minutes, 48 Seconds (as displayed on the end screen while I write this) Date Complete: April 5, 2022
#11 Superliminal (PS4/PS5)
A very strange puzzle game where your perspective literally determines how you can see everything in the game. The mechanic of making objects bigger or smaller based on your perspective of them (literally where are you standing in the room versus where is the object in question in relation to you) is cool but gets a little old after a while and doesn’t do much beyond ‘let’s make this object bigger so I can use it as a step to get out of this room’. The occasional nagging by the female voice to stop wandering around was annoying while the doctor’s voice was rather calm and soothing. The first peek behind the curtain at the beginning of the game felt a lot like that moment at the end of the first Portal where you figure out you can get outside the test chambers and away from GLaDOS’ prying eyes and I loved it. The closer I got to the end of the game the more off the rails “reality” got which was kind of cool but ultimately wasn’t utilized much. I liked that you could clone objects and then merge them all back together, but again, not utilized much. There were a lot of good ideas in this game but they all ultimately fell flat. 3 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 3 hours Date Complete: April 11, 2022
#12 Horizon Forbidden West (PS5)
First off I’m going to say that this game is so spectacular that it more or less deserves its own post but I’m going to try to summarize what I think here.
All the video game podcasts I follow were right, this game is pretty much more of the same as the first game. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it did lead to me nearly burning out on the game early on and quitting but I’m glad I didn’t. They were also right that Aloy talks a lot, at times leading me to mute the game audio so I wouldn’t have to listen to her constant prattling about whatever it was you were doing in the game at the time.
At first I thought that this game had a lot of verticality to it since you start out in what’s basically a canyon and have to work your way out west from there (cue up The Climb from No Doubt) but that was basically part of the “tutorial zone” of the game teaching you how things work. The climbing mechanics this time around were very buggy, it was hard sometimes to get Aloy to climb in the direction and to the ledge or platform that I wanted her to go to. The amount of glitches and holes in the walls and floors this time around is pretty embarrassing since this game was in development for so long but with all the people involved I suppose it’s a miracle it got finished at all.
Also, the opening or tutorial or whatever you want to call it in this game is so long I started to think there was no day/night cycle. There is, it just took a very long time to get to it.
A few other non-story related things about the game that knida irked me were the Vista Point puzzles - I found them annoying to try to solve and one of them that I had activated before doing a story mission actually blocked me from using my Focus to scan enemies. I never solved any of them. The constant auto selecting of quests is very annoying, I got tired of having to go re-select what it was I wanted to do all the time. This game kills DualSense batteries very quickly and I think the amount of haptics the game employs is pretty cool but a lot of the time it’s a bit much. They talk so much in this game that I can make a dialogue choice and go do chores while listening to the novel that erupts from the characters involved. I didn’t really mind it but at times it did kinda drag on and on when you’d have to make a dialogue choice that I thought should have been something that would be automatically stated. Near the end of the game, say the last 25%, combat became less of you shooting at enemies and more of them constantly jumping and bashing you while you’re trying to shoot them in specific spots; the very definition of frustrating. In my own words it was like an un-choreographed monkey shit fight at the zoo and I hated every minute of it. This combat nonsense combined with the irritating climbing controls (there’s a lot of climbing in this game) are why I dinged the game from 5 stars down to 4. Lastly, while the air glider in this game is cool, it’s nowhere near as useful as gliders are in other games (looking at you Breath of the Wild). Aloy sinks like a stone when gliding out to points that I think should be attainable from the height I jumped from. I had hoped for an upgrade to it to happen at some point in the game but was ultimately disappointed. Now, let’s talk a bit about the story.
What started out as a simple ‘we gotta go fix GAIA and save the world’ turns into a mind blowing adventure across a post apocalyptic wasteland set in the ruins of the western half of the United States. Since it’s been 5 years since the first Horizon game, I don’t remember if Far Zenith is ever mentioned in it but the people that fled Earth one thousand years ago came back because their colony in the Sirius system failed.
You meet your new enemies - the Zeniths as they are referred to for the rest of the game - pretty early and the race to deal with them is on. I don’t want to say too much beyond that, only I was satisfied to see them die at the end of the game albeit the victory was a hollow one. They were the pinnacle of human laziness and hubris and deserved to suffer.
I am in love with the GAIA character model. I did enjoy the conversations between her and Aloy, savoring each moment as it happened.
At one point early in the game, you get your own base and build it up, so to speak, over the course of the game. I was sad that once you find it, your friends that you find it with, Varl and Zo, don’t accompany you for the rest of the game. I think it would have been fun to have some company.
Speaking of the base, I was very impressed with how the world state in this game changes and how many times and places it occurs: the base is decorated as your companions come to stay there (I love base building in games), the red algae that chokes the land around Plainsong is eventually destroyed and replaced with lush green farmlands, the Oseram camp in the ruins of Las Vegas. I loved all these details.
When it was revealed that you needed to visit the place where Ted Faro went into hiding and that place just so happened to be in the ruins of San Francisco, I started to get a very sick feeling in my stomach that it would be revealed that Ted was gay. I’m very happy that they didn’t make that choice and I’m also glad that they opted not to show what he had turned into in the darkness of his “tomb”. He deserved the suffering that he wrought.
Near the end of the main story quest, one of the Zeniths - Tilda van der Meer (the stultifying space lesbian) - captures you and takes you to the ruins of her house not far from where the Zeniths base was located. In her house was a small treasure trove of very ancient paintings and statues and sculptures. This room and it’s contents were revealed a few weeks ago in a post on PlayStation Blog and had I not seen that post I think this room would have been a pleasant surprise. It also made my skin crawl that I had found that house many hours prior to this point in the game not knowing where I was.
All I know is that after playing this, I need something to play that’s bright and colorful (not that this game isn’t colorful) and most assuredly not post apocalyptic or loaded with a lot of haptic feedback. 4 out of 5. 2022 Game of the Year.
Total Play Time: 123 Hours Date Complete: April 26, 2022
#13 SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom - Rehydrated (PS5)
This was a fun turn-off-your-brain-and-collect-things style of game that I needed after playing so many sad/depressing/post-apocalyptic games over the last few years. The “story” is a bunch of comedic nonsense that you’ve come to know and love about SpongeBob and friends coupled with some surprisingly good 3D platforming and at times tricky puzzles to figure out. It was colorful, it was funny, it was short. 3 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 14 Hours Date Complete: May 3, 2022
#14 Elden Ring (PS5)
I really don’t know what to say about this game. I didn’t think an open world Souls game would work, but they made it work. I also didn’t think I’d like it as much as I did but if my total play time is any indication, I enjoyed it quite a bit. The game started out fairly easy and straightforward, but after getting your horse and learning how to read the map that quickly degenerated into my usual open world problem of “oh what’s that over there?!” and off I’d go. I was pretty proud of myself for finishing this but I fear that trying to go back and replay the older Souls games after this is going to be even more difficult (looking at you jump button). I was also proud of myself for finding random shit in the game that Alex didn’t like shortcuts and grace points.
Much like the later parts of Horizon Forbidden West, this game suffers from unchoreographed monkey shit fight syndrome in some of the later bosses; bosses leaping high into the air to ground pound, one shot kills, unbreakable grabs, its all every frustrating. For the most part this game does everything else right. The dungeons/caves/legacy dungeons/catacombs were all very well designed and thought out and were my favorite thing about the game. I especially loved the legacy dungeons and could have done with a lot more places like that in the game. Just like every other Souls game, the quests and quest chains in this game were a confusing mess and I had to consult the wiki a lot. I didn’t really care too much about any of the NPCs or whatever machinations they had in terms of vying for the title of Elden Lord, I mostly just used whatever it was they wanted of me as a means to level up and focus myself on a task instead of aimlessly wandering around the world.
I left a lot of shit undone (got 2 endings left to get and a few optional boss fights) in the game and have avoided going into New Game+ for the time being. I might, one day, pick the game back up or start over now that I understand how it works but I’m in no hurry. I’m off to other lands in other games. 4 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 195 Hours Date Complete: June 7, 2022
#15 Eiyuden Chronicle Rising (PS5)
This is an example of taking a little bit and making a lot out of it. I loved the deep world building that was done in this game and I hope that most or all of it carries over to Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes when it releases. The combat was fairly straightforward and not overwhelming but the chain combo attacks were underutilized and a little lackluster for me. Maybe it becomes more substantial at higher difficulty? There was a surprising amount of crafting going on with food, weapons and armor and it never felt overwhelming to me, just really detailed. The fast travel system in this game is sheer brilliance and should be copied by other JRPGs in the future.
All in all it’s a nice appetizer for Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes and definitely entices me to replay this at a harder difficulty in the future. 4 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 32 Hours Date Complete: June 14, 2022
#16 The Last Campfire (PS4/PS5)
A puzzle game sort of dealing with emotional well being and mortality. It was a mostly enjoyable game that deals with the same life/death/rebirth topics that Journey and other games deal with. Some of the puzzles were a tad annoying to figure out, a lot of “oh yeah, duh” moments to be had. The controls were pretty much my biggest negative about the game; unresponsive turning puzzle pieces, confusion about going up or down a ladder, and running just seemingly stopping for no reason. The narrator’s voice was pleasant but after a while just became so bothersome to listen to as I could read faster than sentences were being acted. All in all it was a pleasant experience. 3 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 7 Hours Date Complete: June 21, 2022
#17 Trine Enhanced Edition (PS4/PS5)
Well, after all these years I finally beat this game and I still don’t really like it that much. The art is still amazing and the level design is pretty good but the jumping and movement of the trio is a bit stiff and I feel like a lot of the jumps I made were gimmes. I got significantly less than half of the trophies in the game but I doubt I’ll ever come back to 100% it. 2 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 6 Hours Date Complete: June 21, 2022
#18 The Quiet Man (PS4/PS5)
Absolutely one of the most abysmally terrible games I’ve ever played in my life. It’s like one of those early PS1 era games with pre-rendered backgrounds and polygonal figures spliced in with real people in FMV sequences. It’s like if The Bouncer had a mentally disabled child. It’s like you’re some sort of deaf vigilante at first until you start to understand what’s going on (I still don’t understand what the hell is going on, I just beat the game to get it over with). Not being able to hear what anyone is saying you certainly do pay a lot closer attention to faces, facial expression, and body language. The ethereal tone that’s played when anyone speaks is a neat way to fill in for the absence of voices. Speaking of faces, I got real tired of seeing that woman’s face on the loading screen when you’re defeated and have to start a fight over. It’s also really eerie the way it unfolds: an eye opening, her face comes into focus, and then she makes a face. Hard pass.
The combat system in the game is fairly simple and straightforward, but trying to get the idiot main character to dodge at times is a lesson in frustration. I didn’t even know that I had the ability to use powered attacks with one of the triggers until I managed to decipher it from the bizarrely laid out pause menu (I still don’t understand what the fuck circle does or the other 3 top buttons on the controller) and didn’t start using the power attack until about the halfway point in the game. The fights that had gimmicks to them (like not having any of your power attacks land at all) were frustrating and not at all fun.
I feel like this is what a modern Parasite Eve would look like with regards to the areas of the game where you actually move around and fight. And who the hell does the main antagonist think he is, The Laughing Man from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex? Get over yourself. Spoilers if anyone reading this gives a shit, but it was rather predictable that the main character would wear the fucked up bird mask at some point, it was predictable that the black guy that was his friend would turn on him, and it was also predictable that there would be some sort of over the top moment of power / supernatural ability in the game because Square Enix never misses a chance to pull some shit like that in a game if they can make it fit. I can finally say I played this god awful game. 0.5 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 3 Hours Date Complete: June 22, 2022
#19 Darksiders (PS4)
A mediocre Zelda/God of War clone set on Earth after Armageddon takes place. The falsely accused horseman of the apocalypse, War, sets off on a quest to clear his name after he’s accused of kick starting the end times even though he was merely answering the call. All in all I thought the story was interesting and would be an interesting campaign setting for the old World of Darkness tabletop RPG Demon: the Fallen. The level designs and puzzles were interesting if a bit confusing at times (looking at you Black Throne) and the abilities and power ups reeked of their Zelda heritage (sword power up, hookshot, healing item containers, etc). The control scheme was a mess from start to finish and combat was just brainless button mashing after a while; so tiring and so boring (once you level up your sword it’s pretty pointless to use anything else).
I’m so tired of this art style. It’s been used to death in World of Warcraft, WarCraft III, StarCraft, Diablo III, and now this. It was unique at first but now I’m just so sick of seeing things that look like this, and I don’t even know what the style is called. Modern Tired Gaming? Exaggerated? Distorted? All I know is I hate it and I’m ready for games to move on from it.
I know I’m very late to playing this game (Google says it’s 12 years old) but I doubt I would have liked it more had I played it when it was new. My excitement level for the game was medium to low most of the time. Most nights I just kept going through the game, just to get it done; not much in the way of enjoyment. Other games have used the Zelda formula in better ways.
Considering there’s three more games in the series for me to play after this one, I don’t have a lot of hope that the series gets better. 3 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 26 Hours Date Complete: July 3, 2022
#20 Leaving Lyndow (PS4)
This was a very short game about a girl named Clara who is about to leave her sleepy little port town of Lyndow to go on an expedition by a scientific academy to study the world. I don’t know if I was supposed to feel anything about this character but I didn’t. What made me feel things was how warm and cozy your home was, and your uncle’s small farm house, and the cute little shack out in the woods. I was also puzzled and a little freaked out because all the NPCs in the town have a cloth covering over their mouths but this game was published well before the covid pandemic so…why? Was it an artistic choice?
If anything I think this game’s main take away was supposed to be commentary on growing up and leaving home to live your life on your own terms regardless of what your family and friends say. Ultimately a forgettable experience filled with lots of cozy architecture and beautiful landscapes. 2 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 1 Hour Date Complete: July 3, 2022
#21 Lili: Child of Geos (PS4)
Another short game about a girl named Lili that goes to the island of Geos to study plant life for her father’s magic academy only to be caught up in a sort of war between the Spirits and wooden Constructs on the island.
The gameplay loop was a fairly simple routine of finding and picking flowers in exchange for money and gear as well as some mad cap button mashing fights between Lili and the Spirits. Run up to the Spirit, hit X to initiate the fight, then try to hit the correct button to either pull off flowers or bombs from the Spirits’ backs all while avoiding hitting buttons that correspond to thorns. Lather, rinse, repeat for about 7 hours and you’re done. The only difficulty in it is how fast it goes toward the end of the game.
The writing was fairly entertaining and most of the Constructs were pleasant to look at, but seeing the same faces repeated through out the game became a bore rather quickly. It doesn’t really do anything special but it was a nice diversion from all the doom and gloom games I’ve been playing as of late. Some of the places and things mentioned in the game would make great fodder for tabletop RPGs, I think, but beyond that not much out of the ordinary about this game. 2 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 7 Hours Date Complete: July 4, 2022
#22 Sparklite (PS4/PS5)
When I started this game I assumed it was going to be a typical hack ‘n slash RPG but it really isn’t. It’s an RPG with a Roguelike element: the world layout changes every time you die (it even says in the game’s description that it’s a procedurally generated world, I just wasn’t really paying attention). There are 5 biomes in the game and each time you start a new run, the layout of the biomes changes. I do feel like once you’ve done a few runs through The Vinelands (the starting area) you’ve seen pretty much everything the game has to offer: kill enemies for money, uncover hidden rooms or items under bushes and rocks, die and go back to the ship to spend money on upgrades, start a new run, lather, rinse, repeat.
I don’t know where the user base at How Long To Beat got 9 hours to beat this game from, but they must be some sort of savant at this type of game. It took a little while for me to get enough power to not die like a bitch in the Vinelands but once I got started and was able to hold my own there was no stopping me. The progression in the game, I felt, was gated rather smartly in that you had to complete the previous biome before being able to move on to the next and in doing so you gained a new ability that would carry you through the next area, and so on. Wandering through the forest biome was giving me serious flashbacks to A Link to the Past / Link’s Awakening forests.
The only thing I think I would have asked to change about the game would be the ability to fuse together tier 3 enhancements in the med bay to make room for more skills on your weapon. Other than that I had a good time with the game even if it wasn’t anything to write home about. 3 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 20 Hours Date Complete: July 6, 2022
#23 Hob (PS4)
When I decided to come back to this game, I checked the trophies because I had played it back at launch and wanted to see how much time had passed. The four trophies I had unlocked were from September 2017, five years ago. Yeah, that sounds about right; I haven’t played this game since Matt was here visiting me that year, right before our break up.
Shameless plug for the Steam Community, but if you’re going for all the collectibles, this helps: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2196904186
All in all I think this game is a wonderful open world puzzle with delightful vistas and a charming art style, great atmospheric sounds and music. My only real complaints are that it’s easy to get turned around in the over world and in dungeons with multiple paths here and there and that occasionally I’ll misstep and fall to my death because I’m bad at 3D platforming. The world is well thought out with how things are linked together and how sections are connected, how the solutions to puzzles lead you to the paths that you need to get to and how branching paths can lead you to upgrades if you look closely enough. It’s just too bad the whole thing is tainted with memories of him and a couple game crashing bugs. 3 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 18 Hours Date Complete: July 11, 2022
#24 Sol Seraph (PS4)
This game fucking sucks. I want a refund for the time and money I spent on this game. Spiritual successor to ActRaiser? More like shits on the memory of ActRaiser. This game tries to do a lot of shit and does every bit of it poorly. The overworld maps are nice (the world map is gorgeous and very well laid out) but the tower defense is very badly implemented. The side scrolling stages look nice but there are too many cheap shots and the knockback on your character is completely ridiculous. You can upgrade your health and mana but can’t upgrade your attack power at any point.
Oh and the NPCs like to spring up with their dialogue at the worst possible times. Nothing is more infuriating to me than to be interrupted while I’m trying to finish a task and this game does that in spades. By the second level I was so annoyed with it that I stopped reading and just rapidly pressed the button to get through it so I could get back to the lame ass tower defense.
I’ve never played ActRaiser but other people that have tell me this game is bad. I hope ActRaiser does the things this game does better because this is just garbage. I’ll at least give a half point to the effort you wasted making this game. 0.5 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 7 Hours Date Complete: July 12, 2022
#25 Sayonara Wild Hearts (PS4)
Replay. To get the filthy taste of Sol Seraph out of my brain, I decided to replay an old favorite. I love how well this game marries the visuals and music with the play controls and I don’t think I’ve ever plaything quite like this. Definitely a game I can revisit time and again and not get sick of it. 4.5 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 1 Hour Date Complete: July 12, 2022
#26 Kirby and the Forgotten Land (Switch)
A much needed improvement over Star Allies for the franchise. The levels are a joy to navigate, the textures and colors are vibrant and beautiful, the music is mostly soothing and calming, all in all this was a lot of fun to play! My only real complaints are that there aren’t enough levels and sometimes the controls are a bit wonky.
I can tell that the post game stuff of finding all the Waddle Dees and building up the town is gonna be a lot of fun. I’ve unlocked nearly everything in the town at the time of this writing; maybe only one building left to get? I found the majority of the Waddle Dees as I was playing and played most of the side levels to get ability upgrades. That was a total surprise by the way, all the ability upgrades and how far you could power them up. I assumed it was only going to be ‘unlock this and that’s it’ type of powering up but I was pleasantly surprised.
I would say that this game is taking the Kirby games in a direction that I love. More Kirby games like this please! 4 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 10 Hours Date Complete: July 25, 2022
#27 Magic Sword (PS4)
Played using Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium. I’m still planning on getting a copy of this for SNES at some point in the future and trying for a 1 Credit Clear. This was, and still is, one of my all-time favorite arcade games back in the day and possibly one of the first games I played where it wasn’t the same each time; not quite a Roguelike but not too far away either.
I think I used around 30 credits to get to the end, maybe more, but it was a lot of fun to run through the tower and finally reach Drokmar at the end and kill him. I, of course, chose to destroy the Balckorb when I got to the end. Next time around I’ll keep it and see what happens. 4 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 1 Hour Date Complete: July 26, 2022
#28 Torchlight II (PS4)
Mostly chose to play this on a whim (and because I listen to Rebel FM podcast where one of the hosts mentions this game a lot) and thought it was ok. It has that same tired art style that I’ve seen in World of Warcraft and other Blizzard properties. I also didn’t really understand the story since I didn’t play the first game, but I’m assuming that they are connected to a degree.
I chose to play as an Outlander (dual wields flintlock pistols in the preview which appealed to me) though they have access to melee weapons (swords, spears, and knuckles) and shotgonnes (shotguns) but I feel like all the melee weapons for this class slow the action down drastically and aren’t as much fun as the guns. Mistakenly thought there was nothing like this class in a Diablo game until I remembered the Demon Hunter in Diablo 3.
The pet stuff is a pretty cool addition to the Diablo formula but I mostly used it to go sell off my excess loot and watched it get stuck behind a lot of environmental things (trees, doors, cliff edges, etc.)
The inventory system is annoying and I mostly dislike the gems system because you have to either destroy whatever you’ve socketed to replace it with a different gem OR destroy whatever you put the gem in in order to get the gem back. I don’t remember it working like that in Diablo.
The penalty for dying in this game only really seems to be bad or harsh if you’re carrying a lot of gold, which by the end of the game it mostly became an annoyance since I was running very low on health and mana potions and kept hoarding them until the final boss.
Doesn’t really seem to do a whole lot of new stuff with the Diablo formula beyond getting to the crazy over the top hundreds of enemies on the screen at once fights a lot faster, but in the end it’s still a mediocre clone. 3 out of 5.
Total Time Played: 39 Hours Date Complete: July 26, 2022
#29 Three Fourths Home (PS4)
This is a story about a family of four: Kelly (sister, main protagonist), Benjamin (brother, possibly autistic), David (father), and Norah (mother). The game is basically about Kelly driving home in a severe thunderstorm all while talking on the phone to her family. The gist is, you as the player decide how the conversation pans out by making choices from a selection on the right side of the screen. The only thing I don’t like about this game is that you have to constantly hold down the R2 button in order to progress the game (to drive the car home) and if you let off it essentially pauses the game. Nice touch but pretty annoying because hand cramps are a thing when you’re a 40 year old gamer.
A couple other nice touches to the game are that the car stereo music comes out of the controller speaker and on occasion, when something about the area is mentioned in the conversation, it will suddenly appear in the background.
I found her brother to be highly annoying and I get the sense that he’s disabled somehow or perhaps has autism? Either way, he and the rest of the story are well written. 3.5 out of 5.
Total Time Played: 1 Hour Date Complete: July 26, 2022
#30 The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe (PS5)
This game is every bit of a laugh riot as I imagined it would be. I’ve been waiting for the console port of this game for years and I’m glad it’s finally here. Was a bit disappointed that it was only about an hour long, but it has a lot of replay value. This game is a commentary on choices in video games and how it affects you and your gameplay. It’s also a lot deeper meaning behind choice and consequences, but I leave that to you to interpret. 4.5 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 1 Hour Date Complete: July 26, 2022
#31 Code Shifter (PS4)
I wasn’t too sure about this game from the preview but I took a chance on it and, while it’s an ok game, I wish I could get my money back. It's a game about a company that’s in crunch trying to finish the gold standard for their game that’s about to ship. You play as Stella (the girl that’s in the center of the logo up there) who has developed a tool in the form of an artificial companion named Sera and uses her to “fix” bugs in the game. All the bugs in the game keep getting placed there by some shitlord hacker that goes by the name ‘Ghost’.
I normally fucking hate it when games “voice” the main cast in Simlish or gibberish speech (it’s one of the reasons I just can’t get into Animal Crossing) but I think this game does it rather pleasantly. The office environment is very pretty but it’s not real fun to navigate since it’s all in 3/4 perspective and your movement is very slow and plodding. The fake logos on the snacks near the coffee maker and the bookshelves are a pleasure to look at as is the area with the stadium seats and arcade cabinets.
All the “powers” in the game come in the form of other characters from the developer’s other games that I’ve never played and after playing this I don’t really have a burning desire to. And since these characters can’t be used to fix any of the “bugs” in the game, it’s pretty pointless to play as anyone other than Sera. There was very little in the way of a tutorial and trying to figure out the controls for the first few minutes was annoying. I still don’t really understand the point of the ‘Assist’ characters or how they were to be used. I also didn’t like that the power ups are all lost when you lose a life. It’s also shitty that you have to get S rank on any level - even on normal - in order to get new skills for your character.
I was sure as soon as Hudson mentioned that this shit happened to the company before, when he was young and in charge, that it was the same culprit. I guess we’ll never know, but it’s apparently an alien this time around which was a pretty stupid reveal for me. And yeah I know that’s a spoiler, but I just saved you 3 hours you can use to play something that doesn’t suck. 1 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 3 Hours Date Complete: August 1, 2022
#32 Yoshi’s Crafted World (Switch)
Started this game on 4/29/2020 and just now finally beat it, is how boring I thought this game was. The art style of these games where everything in the world in made out of a mashup of materials such as cardboard, tape, paint, plastic straws, and the like is charming for a bit at first but after a while the charm wears off and the only thing left is the repetitive gameplay. I don’t remember anything about this game beyond Yoshi looking for the stones to go in a bigger stone to make a wish. For the first few worlds I did try to find and collect everything, including the lost Poochie pups, but around the third world I went into speedrun mode just to get it finished.
I see after the credits there’s some post game content that I will respectfully pass on playing. 2 out of 5.
Total Play Time: 10 Hours Date Complete: August 1, 2022
#33 God of War: Ragnarok (PS5)
A technological marvel. I’ve never seen a game as stunning as this. This was an incredible emotional rollercoaster ride from start to finish, though I feel as if some of the key emotional moments were a bit muted and didn’t hit me as hard as I thought they would. Still, this game didn’t come to pass without some tears shed and some intense blood pumping and rage inducing moments.
If they really are planning on making this a trilogy, I’m interested to see where things go from here. And if a third game doesn’t happen, I feel like this ends the series on a nice bookend.
Total Play Time: 60 Hours Date Complete: December 4th, 2022
Other Games I Played in 2022
The Talos Principle
After finding all (well, most of) the puzzle pieces in the first 2 “worlds” I feel like I’ve seen everything this game has to offer (including the whole narrative about going against “god”) and don’t feel inclined to play more or go back and finish the game to get even a basic ending or end credits.
Windbound
A Roguelike/Roguelite where you are a character trying to escape from one series of islands to the next and a big part of the game is sailing on the ocean. I felt like the pacing was way too slow for me and after dying once and losing a lot of progress I decided that I had seen and played enough to get what this game was about and moved on.
Unsighted
I might come back to this eventually, I don’t know. The whole concept of the game - that you are a sentient machine that has a limited amount of time to save the world and the other sentient machines in it - kinda bothers me a little. The other members of the ResetEra Discord told me that I should stick with it and just turn off the time limit stuff, but that feels cheap somehow. I also wasn’t really a fan of the art style or any of the powers you get to traverse the world (it’s a Metroidvania)
Hades
I had to force myself to stop playing this game because it’s one of the better and possibly greatest of the Roguelikes/Roguelites that I’ve ever played. I freaking love the art style and the character models, and that each of the characters in the game is voice acted and has something different to say each time you talk to them. I love that the dead sit and watch you try to escape Tartarus, it’s like it’s their favorite pastime. I also liked that the lights on the DualSense change color depending on which og you’re talking to! It’s the little touches like that that make this game a cut above the others. I will - without a doubt - go back to this game in the future, it’s just too much fun not to play it.
Anuchard
I think the art style of this game is “ok” but how come the Mementos all look crisp and clean and high res and the rest of the game is all pixelated and strange? Having attack and talk on the same button is a stupid design choice when you have 4 face buttons and 2 triggers and bumpers to use. The “reflect” ability does NOT work very well since it and dodge are also the same button. Again, stupid design choices. There is a noticeable amount of tearing of backgrounds in this game (is this what screen tearing is?) and it’s a shame that this wasn’t fixed before launch as it’s quite distracting. The change in the world state as you return the Guardians to Anuchard is pretty amazing and in the case of the Gold Guardian, kind of gaudy. Once you can choose which section of the dungeon you want to go to, it’s nice that there’s a sort of check list of collectibles before you enter. I dislike that you can miss and be unable to complete sidequests. The “currency” being different in each section of the dungeon is unnecessary
Undertale
I think this game is boring and over rated. It's just Sans and Papyrus with their lame ass jokes, the battle system (if you want to call it that) is unpredictable and confusing. The whole time I played, the genocide run was constantly in the back of my mind so I was reluctant to fight anything. I highly doubt I’ll ever go back to this game to finish it.
Asdivine Hearts
The enemies are on 2 rows that are 3 blocks wide but the party is in a 3 by 3 grid? The plot point with Uriel claiming to have met Zack 2 years prior is highly irritating to me. It’s obvious she met that scumbag Julius from Reveria instead but never wants to believe it. The story started out pretty funny with the Light Deity getting stuck inside a cat but spirals out of control into a multiverse / mirror universe story full of problems. I hate that there are weapons of lower power in my inventory that I can’t sell. I hate it when RPGs do that shit. Absolutely love the art and sprites and character designs, but Uriel has a face I want to slap. The use of names in this game is a bit tiresome (Gutenberg, Uriel, Orcus, etc.) and cliché. The shop screen is annoying to navigate. The difficulty spikes in this game are ridiculous to the point that I just threw the game down and might come back to it later. It’s having ‘Return of the King syndrome’ where every time I think it’s going to end it just keeps going what the fuck. Maybe someday when I forget how irritating this game is I’ll be able to stomach finishing it and picking up the second one. I’m not terribly thrilled about the idea of climbing Mt. RPG after the slog that has been Asdivine Hearts, but I’ve made this bed and I’m going to lay in it and like it.
And with that, I officially retire from trying to complete the ResetEra 52 Games Challenge. I just don’t like having to game on a schedule of any kind or having what I am playing chosen at someone else’s whim. It’s still entertaining reading other’s thoughts on a game in real time via Discord, but it’s just not for me.
Also, with the revelation that some games that I bought thinking were going to be fun and turning out to be not so great has done wonders to prevent me from buying more digital games along with some ridiculous price points. I might be able to whittle my backlog down after all but only time will tell.