Finished Framed 2 and it is more of the same. If you liked the first one, you'll like this one too. I played the first on tablet but the sequel on pc and enjoyed both. Puzzles are not always easy but well-thought. The downside is the story, not really interesting.

Full list here.

Dungeon Girl

Fun casual match 3 (sort of) style RPG with a metric ton of items to find and combine to form more items.

Phew, just finished Owlboy and my fingers are stiff. Got it from the Gog 10th Annivesary Bundle from the one and only Doc0075.

I'm not a good platformer gamers, but I have to say I quite enjoy the experience. The story and characters are good. The music are brilliant. The platformer parts are tough but fair, though the boss fight for me is too difficult. Maybe the fact that I only use Mouse & Keyboard played a part, but I'm not good at controller either, so who knows. I will not be surprised if there is a sequel in the future.

Redneck Rampage - 3/5

Played via RedneckGDX.

For the most part, I was not a fan of the game thematically or aesthetically, but I did enjoy a bunch of the soundtrack. Although, listening to the same eight songs over and over can get pretty repetitive.

In terms of gameplay, there's some interesting ideas and mechanics - e.g. drinking alcohol restores your health; drinking too much causes you to stammer and stumble; drinking far too much makes you fall over. However, the Doom II-esque convoluted/labrynthine level design can become tiresome.

Apple Cider Spider. Admittedly, this isn't really a game you finish, but I'm just putting it down because I've played through its stages. It's an arcade-style platform game published by Sierra for the Apple II in which you control a spider in an apple cider bottling factory. You have to crawl and climb through each level until you get to the attic or rafters of the factory and rejoin your spider buddies up there, avoiding the apples being processed and other threats like frogs and birds (apparently the building doesn't have windows or something)

It won't blow your mind or anything like that, but it's one of those games that you can pick up and start playing immediately and just have some fun. Easy to control - you can jump, and when you climb you can shift from one side of a rope to the other, which is important depending on the threat coming at you - and after three pretty tough levels it starts over again. Pretty nice-looking and sounding by Apple II standards, too.

This brings back memories, I played this game on a C64 back in the day.

Games I completed in 2018:

Red Dead Redemption 2.
DOOM
Metro Last Light.
The Witcher 3.
God Of War.

Ditto! I think it's awesome that each level is correlated to subsequent levels, i.e. you see a full operating machinery and what drops at the bottom of one level fall down at the same spot a level below.

Ashen (XB1X)

Every review out there will tell you this one is a Souls game with it's own spin and art style. This time they are all pretty much spot on. And the Souls games are my favorite action RPG's by far, so it doesn't take Einstein to work out I'd be playing this.

Combat is lifted straight out of a From Soft game, though I feel it's a bit slower and you cannot get away with roll spamming as much. You have only three types of weapon here which fall into one of three classes, slow, even slower and ridiculously slow. You adapt to it quickly and it's all pretty well balanced.

The world uses a more stylised art work compared to the grittiness of the Souls games. It ran very smooth on Xbox, as it should since it's been marketed for some time for the system. There is a choice of 4K or 1080p mode...but honestly the only difference I could see or feel was that 1080 was softer...if there was a performance increase then I sure couldn't feel it. When choosing a graphics mode I always choose the one that makes a difference in some way, in this case that was 4K.

I really felt like this sort of game and overall it was a great 20 hour or so experience. Story was okay but not the main focus.The difficulty was mostly spot on...except for the final boss which I found ridiculous playing solo or with an AI partner. After trying for a couple of hours I finally just matched up with someone and took the bitch down in an epic co-op battle that went for ages. The rest of the game though was as expected, slowly explore and take on the enemies on your own terms as much as possible.

Ashen can be played entirely solo if you like, or with AI partners that represent the main NPC's in the game. The AI companions are mostly competent and useful except in the final boss fight where they get mauled in no time. Co-op is as easy as turning on multiplayer and just play...the game matches you automatically, when it can, to people in the same place doing the same stuff and the human takes the place of the AI. It works well when it works at all, but at the end it was hard to get matched for the final boss. That could just be because the game is new and not that many have even got to the end yet (only 0.8% are listed as having the final boss achievement for example).

If it falls down compared to a Souls game then it's in two areas. The map is just a simple and pretty linear experience. It lacks the amazing world design full of shortcuts of Dark Souls and Bloodborne. Though the map still does have its moments just the same, like when you come out of a tunnel into one area that opens up into a palace like city.
As well as that I was sometimes annoyed at how much the game relies on ambushing the player with unseen enemies. Enemies often wait hidden behind pillars or on unreachable ledges and just jump on you. It's not as bad as spawning enemies, but it still gets way overused and is a bit of a cheap of way of making areas more difficult.

But really enjoyed it overall. If you have an Xbox, play it on Game Pass if this type of game is your thing. Or try the new Epic Game store for PC I suppose.

Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos, Dec 13 (GOG)-I had a lot of fun with this one in the early and mid game. The late game was marred by a pretty big difficulty spike both in terms of combat (my weapons and spells were marginally effective and I had to rest after every couple battles) and in terms of puzzles (the last few levels I used a walkthru for most of it). Inventory management was also quite annoying. Overall though I enjoyed it. It was just long enough where it was only just starting to drag at the end. Unlike say, Stonekeep, which felt very similar throughout but was 2-3 times longer and wore out its welcome after about the length of time I spent on LOL.

Full List

i guess you aren't "comfortably dumb" anymore :D

Just finished Yakuza Kiwami on PS4 on normal difficulty. That's two Yakuza games down in two months, having finished Yakuza 0 just last month.

I was instantly surprised by many of the differences between 0 and Kiwami, many of which are certainly a result of the fact that Kiwami was released just after 0 but at the same time the game is a remake of the very first Yakuza game. It was particularly surprising due to the huge number of things that are practically identical between the two. I never played the original Yakuza games but things which I assumed were true for all or at least most games in the series turned out to be either a characteristic of 0 or (paradoxically) the chronologically later games which have been released before these two.

Anyway, I'll instantly say that Kiwami is in my opinion the worse game of the two and it can be felt very strongly from the game's very beginning. On one hand the game is missing a number of things that were present in 0 (but presumably absent in the original Yakuza), on the other it feels to me like the series took a few entries to refine its formula and style. The pacing is a lot worse, with a very slow start, and the writing feels much more cliched, less plausible and simply kinda worse - although still pretty good. Oddly the "substories" (sidequests) suffer from kinda the opposite - while in 0 they are the part where the game becomes outrageously absurd and over-the-top, serving hugely as comic relief, here many of the substories are about rather mundane things and feel like the part that is supposed to (sometimes) deal with the more common and realistic Yakuza stuff than the main plot. Then there's the most obvious differences: there's only one map (Kamurocho), there's only one playable character (Kiryu) and it lacks the business mini games that guarantee you an easy income. The city also lacks a few of the more interesting locations from 0. That the game is smaller is not really a problem, however, it still took me 40 hours to finish the thing, which is more than enough content, but 0 took me more than 90 hours (with a similar completion rate for optional content).

Most shockingly (if not as obvious as the other points): here you actually have traditional XP alongside money, so you actually have to fight and do sidequests to improve your character, and one entire skill tree, for the arguably most powerful "Dragon style", is only filled by performing a variety of tasks, mostly revolving around competition with Majima, the second protagonist from 0. Incidentally the balancing feels much better here. While Kiwami is still a very easy game all in all (at least on normal difficulty), the difficulty curve and character building feel a lot more consistent, although you can max out everything well before finishing the game if you do enough optional stuff (but without grinding, which is good). Once again the toughest fights are unrelated to the plot, though, mostly optional, and even those can be bruteforced by stocking up on healing items. Even the game's final fights were very easy by comparison, which is kinda dumb.

And while I'm on the subject of Majima: he feels like an entirely different character here. 0 apparently tried to deliver Majima's origin story and explain how he became who he is (a hilarious violent maniac), but frankly it fell quite short of it. By the beginning of Kiwami seven years have passed between 0 and Kiwami and his actual transformation must have happened in this time frame which we know nothing about (at least having played only 0 before this).

Anyway, it's still a really good and fun game. The characters are really cool and likeable, the plot still feels kinda plausible and engaging compared to must stuff I'm used to from video games, and the core mechanics are, if not fantastic, at least very fun. The combat, which is virtually identical to the system in 0, is pretty good and has some depth to it but you're not forced to fully master all its intricacies to finish the game. And since you generally can outrun enemies, you're rarely forced to fight random enemies if you don't feel like it. And while there's fewer side activities here, many of them are still pretty "big" and fun to do. And even though the substories are less humorous, several of them had me crying from laughter. I was definitely well-entertained from start to finish.

I definitely recommend 0 to anyone who doesn't know where to start with the series, but Kiwami is still a very good game and I can't wait to play Kiwami 2, even though I've just put about 150 hours into the series already.

GRIS - 4/5

An incredibly pretty game that has some cool mechanics. Sadly, the environment, as pretty as it is, does not always make it easy to differentiate between the background and the foreground.

Limbo

An absolute must have for each and all.