Glass Masquerade (DLC)

I'd completed the main game (last year?) but recently picked up the halloween/christmas/Inception DLC, and finally finished them off tonight.

On the whole, I think the DLC puzzles are harder overall. In the base game I average 5-7 minutes, and a number of these were in the 11-14 range. Oddly the Romania puzzle (ranked 5 star difficulty) I actually finished the quickest at 7:10 or so.

Considering I got both the game and the DLC (and a gift base game) for $2, it was well worth it. A good looking, effective jigsaw puzzle game with a well done musical score.

When I'll have the $5 to buy GM2 remains to be seen. Might make a good Christmas present for myself.

Tacoma

I got the free version that was available on Humble last week. It's a walking sim. Let's face it, it's a genre that is always going to be hit or miss, depending on if the subject matter and story resonates with you or not. For example the concept behind Everybody's Gone to the Rapture really hooked me. Unfortunately Tacoma did not do it for me. I found the story a bit dull, it lacks the sort of atmosphere and music of Gone Home and the mixed up styles of What Remains of Edith Finch. Tacoma is not bad but just forgettable. I think a much better attempt at the same type of story is The Turing Test -it's a puzzle game though but similar themes and has actual game play as well.

I think more than any genre, walking sims tell you something about the developers, or at least allow them to express themselves. Fullbright, in my estimation are pretty proud lefties with a bit of a lesbian fetish going on.

Finally finished another game... I've been wavering back and forth for the past few weeks. Here's my review.

Ne no Kami: The Two Princess Knights of Kyoto
I purchased Ne No Kami with decently high expectations, given that I have enjoyed Sekai's previous games on GOG. However, I can't really recommend it. The description talks about princesses, about fate, and about knights. What we get over the ten hours of playing time (for Part 1 and 2) is far from this, instead being full of common visual novel tropes. Light spoiler summary: Our main character, Len, is a normal high school girl until she is whisked away and taught about a world that has remained hidden beneath a "veil" (for lack of a better term) through the machinations of an ancient, nigh ethereal organization. The ayakashi (yokai) are involved, as is the pantheon of a culture very far removed from Japan and advanced scientific technology. It's something we've seen in anime and manga time and time again, and I grew tired of it pretty quickly. The characters, despite the claims on this page, are not sufficiently well written to elevate the material to what was promised. Also, note that this is a censored version; uncensored patches for these games are not free, but must be purchased elsewhere. Why am I giving this two stars, then? The animation is still pretty good, So that's worth a star. Note that Part 1 and Part 2 have to be played in order for this game to make any sense. This is not a game you can just pick up in the middle; if you buy one, you might as well buy both.

Sadly, I was hoping to add 1979 Revolution: Black Friday to this list, but I'm getting too frustrated by my 940MX struggling to run it at 30 FPS.

MDK. I hadn't played this one back when it was new, so it was interesting catching up with it. I found it pretty easy as it's mostly Circle-Strafing: The Video Game, with a few puzzle-solving and sniper bits thrown in for variety. It's also pretty short at only 6 levels, although it doesn't allow in-level saving, so if you get killed you get to replay the whole level again, which can be deflating depending on how far along you were.

I loved the surreal style of the game. It feels a little bit like something Planet Moon Studios would have come up with, except even farther out there (and I just now read that the creator was the founder of Planet Moon, so there you go). You start out parachuting into the level to try and stop the bad guys before they destroy what I assume are mostly small British towns (?), although if you take too long the game just makes a joke out of it. The levels are often beautiful, with vast reflective surfaces all over the place. Platforming can get a little slippery - there's a part in the fifth level that's a total pain in the ass because you have to make a couple of jumps upward in a big room onto very thin walkways and if you slip you most likely go all the way down to try all over again. There's a six-legged dog in a domino mask for some reason.

Puzzle Quest 2. It was a fun game to play on my new tablet.

The Walking Dead: Michonne (XB1X)

A mini Telltale tale. It is meant to fill in a gap in the comic book series, where Michonne splits from the group. I've read the Comics up to and past that point and I'm not really sure the game fits in all that well from a story point of view. But it was still an okay little story in its own right. Played using Game Pass. Don't need to buy games no more.

Finished Assassin's Creed: Unity on PS4 yesterday. So, this is the AC game that heralded the series' downfall before it redeemed itself with Odyssey (which I haven't played yet). I assumed that the flaws were very exaggerated and at least the technical ones would have been entirely removed with patches. Well... er...

First off, even a bad AC game is still a pretty good game as far as I'm concerned and I did enjoy Unity. The parkour stuff is both fun and relaxing and Paris during the French Revolution is hell of a location for a game. They also really outdid themselves with the ridiculously massive angry crowds that seem to grow as the movement unravels. And in spite of the game's many flaws I just wanted to keep going.

But there's no denying it: Unity, which was meant to introduce an entirely new generation of AC games, was a step backwards in so many ways, it's crazy. The city may be geometrically massive but the game still manages to feel much smaller than earlier AC titles, largely due to the fact that everything is taking place in this one city without the need to ride or travel by sea between distant locations. And the city itself lacks visual diversity - it may be much more massive than, say, Rome in Brotherhood but Rome was loaded with distinct areas and it frequently made you feel like you're in an entirely different place. That's a feeling that's almost completely missing from Unity. Admittedly there's one more location, Versailles, but that one is so utterly meaningless and small that it doesn't really contribute anything.

Unity also fails to introduce any meaningful new mechanics and got rid of many earlier ones. There's no horse riding or ships, there's no stalking zones or whistling, there's really no interesting gadgets. The options at your disposal for solving stealth or combat situations are ridiculously limited compared to some earlier AC titles. And the way character development works here, with skill points gained by doing story and coop missions, you may end up with only a fraction of abilities from earlier games - I think by the end I still have not unlocked double air assassinations, for example, because I put my points in abilities that felt more important, in particular the three levels of friggin' lock smithing since that one is necessary for getting tons of collectables. The game also lacks any sensible meta mechanics. Since ACII every AC game had some mechanic where you "build" something, whether it's renovating your mansion or building a trading fleet. Here you get to renovate your main base and a few other clubs but that can be done in a matter of hours and then there's no notable progression ever again.

The thing is, apparently all this meta gameplay was pretty much moved into the coop mode and companion app. The companion app is now defunct and any of the (ridiculously bad and tiny) content that could be accessed through it can now be accessed without without restrictions from the game. As for the coop: it's still there, people still play it and it's okay as far as I can tell but nothing overly amazing - it's what fans would have probably expected since the series first introduced multiplayer. I'm not necessarily a fan of how coop was implemented here, though, and what impact it had on other mechanics. E.g. item and skill progression are much more detached from story progress, you can unlock end-game items early on just by collecting money, it's just specific items that can only be gotten by either playing the story mode or doing certain coop missions. Likewise, most skills are unlocked via some sort of skillpoints now and you can't easy unlock all of them, like they were encouraging player to choose classes for coop. I feel that the result hurts the singleplayer experience a lot and it's also not a very good system for multiplayer. It's not like I can buff my character up a lot by playing coop anymore, I'm just unable to max him out without coop (if that's even possible with coop). Oh yeah, and almost all items are obtained just by purchasing them from some menu screen which can be accessed at any point, you can also change equipment on the spot. Talk about breaking immersion.

Anyway, and in all of this they really neglected the foundations. The stealth mechanics are meh, combat is meh, mission design is very meh. Even the parkour feels kinda worse than in earlier titles. It has always been common in the series that the hero would get stuck and not jump where they should but I feel like Unity reached entirely new levels in this regard. Even taking cover by sticking to a wall is extremely flimsy. Ironically Unity is the first game in the series where in-door areas are featured rather heavily and it is in direct conflict with the utterly unresponsive controls that make navigating these narrow areas a nightmare. Certain story missions pretend that there's some Hitman-style options that make the objective easier to achieve but it's just a matter of following a few more quest markers and the result usually doesn't even have much of an impact on anything. Honestly, the only assignments that were genuinely interesting to me were the entirely optional murder cases where you get to collect evidence and then have to determine who is the culprit. But even those aren't usually nearly as good as they could be and only a single story mission uses this pattern and there you can't really go wrong at all.

Additionally the game is an utter UX nightmare. The game bombards you with shitty tutorial popups (which, I guess, I could turn off but I wouldn't because I might end up missing the occasional useful message) which often manage to cover up crucial other stuff. You are not able to easily tell if and how much money is waiting to get picked up at your hideout. The map is wider than tall, so you can see further to the sides than ahead. They use different icons for the same currency in different places. Bonus objectives for getting a perfect rank are still ridiculously easy to miss (which has somehow always been true for the serious - idiots). And what's funny, on some missions you can't just look at the objectives at first because the objective list gets covered up by updates telling you that an objective has been added - one that you could already briefly see on the objective list. What the hell.

Finally: the story. The story of Arno, the assassin we control during the French Revolution, is just okay at best. He feels like a poor man's Ezio. He's an okay character but really very similar to Ezio and far less developed. The intrigue going on is at the same time simplistic and hard to follow and can't compete with most earlier titles. You get to meet historical figures like Robespierre, Napoleon Bonaparte and De Sade but they appear very briefly and aren't very important to the plot - they feel squeezed in for the sake of being there even by the series' standards. The modern-day story tying Arno's chapter into the series is utter shit, however. From what I can gather you're just some random guy playing on Abstergo's new console, your gameplay gets interrupted by Rebecca and that English guy from the earlier games who "recruit" you and... well, you just keep playing the game to uncover "utterly crucial" information to allow them to foil Abstergo's attempts to find the body of another sage - the game doesn't even bother to remind you why that matters (and I honestly don't know why it would be a bad thing if Abstergo found that sage). Aaaand... sorry for the spoiler but in the end it turns out that none of that mattered. Honestly, you don't discover anything useful, finishing Arno's story has literally no meaning whatsoever.

Soooo, Unity is still somewhat fun but yeah, it's a fraction of what it could and should have been. It's not just a matter of not meeting too high expectations, the game is literally worse than earlier AC titles in most regards other than the graphics which are, most of the time, pretty impressive.

I see you like your genre labels. Here's one to add: 3D should be "third person". A lot of other games in your list are 3D too, though you don't mention it.
And Dead Space isn't an FPS; it's not first person. (and I wouldn't call it a shooter either - but opinions differ on what "shooter" actually means)

Yeah, TBH I started playing Dead Space and, yes decided it was more of a FPS/RGP hybrid (which is actually in 3rd person but hey ho) - seems like a slightly dumbed down System Shock 2 remake from what I played of it and put Heretic in the FPS slot instead, I must have copy/pasted an old list, sorry! Thanks for the catch!

Portal (C64)

No, that's not a typo, this game is Portal for the Commodore-64!

Well, sort of. There are only 20 levels, none of them hard, and it should take less than 30 minutes to complete. But it's very polished and works well, portal gun and all!

And at the end, there is cake :).

Now I've also finished the Dead Kings DLC for Assassin's Creed: Unity - well, its singleplayer campaign specifically. I'm both positively surprised and disappointed.

First off: it's free and quite extensive. That was a nice surprise. It adds an entire new town that seems to be about the same size as Versailles but also features a rather massive underground dungeon that spans almost the entire town. The entire map is visually distinct from the base game, with everything being rather rundown and a constantly grey sky. It has a strong Gothic horror vibe. The DLC also introduces a new kind of weapon, the guillotine gun, which is both, a strong two-handed melee weapon and basically a grenade launcher. It also introduces a lantern which... well, more about that later.

So like almost all DLC from the series it's a pretty detached story that doesn't really contribute anything to the lore. Just another dungeon of those precursor guys, another Apple of Eden and the tale of how another assassin kept bad people, in this case Napoleon, from obtaining it. It's really just an excuse for sending the player into a new location with a distinct kind of gameplay. When it ended I was just "oh okay".

What's nice is that the DLC differs not only in tone but also in gameplay from the base game.There's a few riddles to solve in the dungeons, some of which involve said lantern - e.g. the lantern will uncover clues on the walls or you have to find a route that will keep it from getting wet. It's a decent mechanic but I feel like they wasted some of its potential, that they could have made much better puzzles with it. There's also a few camps that can be "liberated" which will remove enemies from big portions of the map, the raiders in the dungeons have captains and will disperse if they witness the death of their captain. Those are decent additions but ironically it's basically all stuff we've seen in the series in some form already and that was much more developed in at least some earlier AC titles.

Anyway, the DLC has really just affirmed by impressions that the base gameplay is pretty flawed. Stealth and combat are just so friggin' wonky and not much fun, even climbing is really worse than in earlier titles. The DLC is good by the game's standards but sadly those standards are pretty low.

Mass Effect Trilogy.

I always played as a femshep romancing Garrus, now I'm playing male and romacing Kelly Chambers. Keep your fingers crossed!

and after 20 years since i last played it Diablo 1 is beaten. for the first time.

yay.

Finished Hero of the Kingdom. An isometric story-telling game, with a story that's not very original, nor is it challenging, but it's a fun unpretentious game of helping people, gathering herbs, hunting, building and eventually becoming the Hero of the Kingdom. It's a nice break from true games that are difficult, casually clicking through the story. Fun thing, the game was translated to Dutch for me and I didn't encounter that many language errors.