Deliver Us The Moon (XB1X)

Just hit Xbox Game Pass, so decided to get straight to it using my seemingly never ending free Game Pass subscription.
It's a good game, one of the best I've played so far this year in fact. It looks like a walking simulator, but I think it has a bit more too it than that. It has puzzles, that are not overly difficult but sometimes timed, and arcade sequences that test a bit of co-ordination. So you may not like it if those two aspects are not your thing. But I found nothing to be too frustrating. The game deserves credit for not doing what something like Hellblade did- repeating one or two puzzles over and over. This one mixes thing up a bit.

Despite some questionable science, the story is quite good and doesn't drag itself out too long. You start on Earth, launch yourself into space, fly to the moon and solve the mystery of what happened to Earths Moon based energy generation colony.

The game has a reputation on PC for severe frame drops in a few critical places- namely the tricky final game sequence. I can only speak for Xbox One X, where that did not occur. The arcade sequences ran and controlled fine. There were a few places where frame rate dropped a little, but it was rare and not where it caused game play problems. There's two modes to choose from: 4K/30 or 1080/60. I played the 60fps mode. I assume that base Xbox and PS4 versions probably only have a 30fps option. The ray tracing is meant to be really good on PC for this, so if the developers end up patching that into the next Xbox, I'll play it through again for sure.

Space Ace. It's Dragon's Lair but sci-fi :p Much like with that game, a lot of the appeal of this for me is just enjoying the animation, and I think the concept of a square-jawed space hero constantly reverting to a spindly dweeb is hilarious. As with many timing dependent games, I feel like I deserve some kind of extra credit for managing to beat this while my cats ran back and forth in front of the TV, creating numerous distractions and sometimes blocking the control indicators.

Prince of Persia. I had played this off and on ever since the DOS version came out but somehow always bogged down somewhere around level 5 or 6, so I decided I better finally get through it all. I was surprised that it turned out to have 12 levels because I had gotten it into my head that I was almost done on my earlier runs. Anyway, I ended up finishing with about 19 minutes of the 60 minute limit remaining.

The best strategy for winning seems to be that once you get far enough to save your progress, you explore the levels to figure out the most efficient route to the exit, and then reload and try to make that happen, reloading if you make more than one or two serious mistakes to ensure you have plenty of time for the later levels. Despite all the obstacles and enemies, the time limit is really the true enemy in the game.

It's still a very striking-looking game with the rotoscoped animation and clean yet evocative level design. The controls are a mixed bag. I think the sword-fighting is well done in that it creates the illusion of you having some cool fencing duels while actually being very simple to learn and execute (I've been watching a lot of classic swashbuckling movies lately and I would say the greatest movie swordfight of all time is probably Tyrone Power vs. Basil Rathbone in The Mark of Zorro. They were both fencing experts and basically just did everything short of actually killing each other for that one. It's like fencing equivalent of a couple of pro wrestlers deciding that the best way to spruce up their match is to just punch and headbutt each other for real. Anyway...). But I've never gotten on too well with the general movement, particularly when you have to do long jumps while at a full sprint because I'm not so good with the timing of those.

A couple of the puzzles got me pretty good and I suspect that's why I never finished it. It never occurred to me in the past that guards on the top level can your footsteps and get ready to ambush you later. Oops. All together, it's a very pleasant game that doesn't overstay its welcome and aside from the control issues for me, it mostly provides the right kind of frustration in that I felt like my failures were my fault instead of the game screwing with me.

Insecticide, Part 1 (2008)

Cleaning up my harddisk a little, I found I still had this one installed since forever, but I had only ever played until the second level or so, so I started from scratch and completely played through it. Was it worth it though? I'm not sure.

It's a bit of a shame, because there are quite a few things to like about it. It's no coincidence that it feels like a mixture of Grim Fandango and Psychonauts, since, like the latter, it was also created by a couple of ex-LucasArts employees who had worked on the classics back then, and the very nice soundtrack was composed by none other than Peter McConnell who also provided the music to the other two titles named above. Apart from that, it has great voice-acting, and decently witty writing; the noir story is maybe a bit too heavy on the tropes and a bit predictable because of that, but it's still nice enough and creative due to the bug setting. I also liked the art style that's somewhat reminiscent of Psychonauts (there might be a personnel overlap in the art department there too, but I'm not sure).

So what's wrong with it? For one, it's just half of a game. Their publisher got bought and the new owner scrapped Part 2. I think it was later released on the DS exclusively, but the DS version looks pretty bad in comparison graphically, it also replaces videos with comic stills, from what I hear, and the voice-acting isn't present either. The developers put the voiced videos they had done for the PC version of Part 2 on YouTube, so that you can at least get a rough overview of how the story would have evolved and ended, which is nice, even if it feels a little fragmentary. But sadly (or fortunately?), I didn't think Part 1 all that much fun to play anyway. It didn't really feel like a fully realized game to me. There was so much potential, and the presentation is quite nice already, but the gameplay is far below LucasArts and Double Fine standards. It alternates between police chase action levels and point-and-click adventure investigation levels, but neither are really all that good in their genre.

The adventure game levels are rather short and simple, but I still managed to get stuck in one, due to the weird controls and lack of modern ease-of-use features. It starts with the game not explaining anything to you; I had to study the control setting to even find out what to do in adventure mode, how to talk to people, look at things etc., it wasn't intuitive at all: you first have to press Space in order to examine and interact with your surroundings. And then I realized that while you can do that anywhere, hotspots only appear if you do it once a question mark appears on your map. You can stand right next to a scene, try to examine it and find nothing, just because your view wasn't perfectly aligned with that question mark spot on your map, one little step to the side, one little turn of the camera, press Space again, and suddenly all the hotspots are there. Then I noticed these adventure scene spots are actually marked on the map, on your radar, so you move towards such a point, align the camera until a big question mark appears, and THEN press Space to start examining. Which is quite a weird system, but that's not the problem, the problem is that the game tells you nothing about it. And I think this was a download-only game on PC, I doubt it had a manual. And you have to mouse over everything in order to find hotspots, which is okay, old-school style, but in combination with the above, it lead to me missing some things and having to consult a walkthrough once or twice.

The action levels look nice enough, but are very bare-bones. The shooting almost seems to work like a point-and-click adventure, too, meaning that if your reticule isn't red because you didn't point it exactly at the enemy, they will not be hit by your missiles, even if they fly right at them. Because of that I hardly found good reasons to bother with any other weapon but the most basic one in the game, because it did the job fastest and across the greatest distances. What good is e.g. a short ranged shotgun, if the pellets miss so easily on moving enemies, while you can just shoot them from far away with your unlimited ammo pistol? Not that ammo is rare in the game, and neither are medpacks (soda cans), I didn't collect a single one of the hidden health upgrades and would still have gotten through the action levels easily without dying (there are no difficulty levels, btw), if it wasn't for the clunky platforming combined with instadeath on falling even from heights that you should be able to survive normally, and you have to guess and learn which falling distance is still okay and which means death, which is not cool, and the mechanic can even become quite frustrating at some points and discourage exploration and hunting for secrets, because you'll lose everything after the last checkpoint again anyway, if you die.

There were a few technical issues as well. The mouse sensitivity felt weird at first (a bit too fast, while not that smooth), but changing it in-game I hardly noticed any difference between min and max. After quitting the game, my mouse in Windows suddenly felt sluggish (but maybe that was just in comparison, after becoming accustomed to the weird speed in-game?). The game allows you to toggle on subtitles, but they are not shown in video cutscenes, only during gameplay, although there is much more talk in the cutscenes, and subtitles would also be more useful in them because the videos have lower volume and sound quality than the voices during gameplay. One time the game crashed on me, but not by returning me back to Windows, but by not reacting anymore, and I even had difficulties to ALT-Tab out of it and could not access the task manager in order to close it. The only way to get out of that was to tell Windows to shut down (then abort once the game was closed).

Anyway, that's already a lot more text than anyone is going to want to read about such an old and obscure game with mixed ratings, but since I already spent all that time on playing it (~4 hours? but most of the time was spent not knowing what to do or repeating sections due to instadeath, the actual game is really rather short), I thought I could just as well write down my thoughts, so I didn't "suffer" through it in vain. It actually wasn't that bad, but sadly it wasn't as much fun as it should have been either. And it's not like I hadn't been warned by the ratings, but the nice presentation and writing lured me in anyway. At least now I can unistall it from my harddrive once and forever. :D

But still, a shame that this never evolved into a complete PC game with all its potential fulfilled, and was doomed to the existence of a demo-like fragment with a glimpse of what could have been, but all in all somewhat primitive and subpar gameplay.

Mechner actually did turn to classic sword fighting scenes to rotoscope the swordfighting : https://youtu.be/sw0VfmXKq54?t=953

It's definitely a timeless classic. I also properly finished it for the first time only a few years ago. The sequel btw is phenomenal as well. Even better imo

Borderlands 3: Moxxi's Heist of the Handsome Jackpot

Yeah, yeah, I know, I played the DLCs in the reverse order! But only because I wasn't aware it was a full-fledged DLC, I thought it was more like a side mission better done with coop players... I was totally wrong! It's a full-fledged DLC, with a story, and a good one too! Lots of the silly Borderlands humor I love, new guns, packed to the brim with action!

Really enjoyed it, as much as I enjoyed the Love, Guns and Tentacles one! To be honest, to me Borderlands has so far always delivered with its DLCs and I hope it will continue that way for a long time!

So far in 2020: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2020/post29

Resident Evil Revelations (XB1X)

It's pretty bad when a remaster of a 3DS games is better than two actual numbered games in the series. Revelations is better than both Resi 5 and 6. At least it feels more like classical Resi, but it's not as good as Revelations 2. Otherwise standard Resi tropes- B-grade voice acting and dialogue. Ridiculous plot. The worlds most inept and out of shape special forces operatives in history. They cannot sprint faster than a slow jog. They stop and have a chat with enemies and let them escape, and the most traditional Resi trope of them all: no one ever checks to see if what they just killed is actually really dead. And you do all that with basically no ammo.

So it's a Resi game through and through. It's okay but I still like the original Resi remake and Resi 4 best, simply because they feel like horror games with their great settings.

I remember that drop. It had me stumped until looking up a guide. Even then it took me quite a few kills to get the item to drop. Locking progression behind a random drop was a bit of a dick move. I don't remember the other two points holding me up though. I really liked the game, and since I still haven't played SotN, the similarities didn't stand out to me.

The game is also on PC Game Pass, so that would have been a cheap way just to play the game (maybe using the trial period) whilst the price comes down.

Whispers of a machine

Game is an ok adventure, but nothing special imo. Puzzles are mostly easy, and it's not that long. There's some replayability, because there are three different paths, but I can't be bothered to try them all, since the story didn't captivate me...imo it's fairly weak and doesn't really do much with its interesting themes about super AIs and transhumanism. The save system is absolute bs...only automatic saving in an adventure? There are three endings, depending on your final choice in the game, but if you want to see them all, you have to play the entire game three times (or watch it on Youtube)? Who came up with such a stupid design choice?
I really enjoyed some of the new adventures in the early to mid-2010s like Primordia, Resonance and Technobabylon, but lately I've been disappointed by the genre.
My rating: 3/5. Buy it on a sale, imo not worth the full price.

Shardlight

This was on odd choice for me to make at this time ...

I just recently decided to finally play through some of the better adventure games on top of my list, among them most prominently a couple of WadjetEye produced titles I hadn't played yet, and I spontaneously started with Shardlight, because I had actually played the beginning before but then stopped and forgot about continuing it for some inexplicable reason. I recall that I liked what I had seen so far, and I thought I'd still remember it well, but then it came as a surprise to me when I started it from scratch now and realized what it's essentially about: a game set in a future when people are scared of a spreading lung disease plague for which there is no cure yet and only limited vaccines, and everyone is covering mouth and nose with face masks to protect themselves from it ... It felt very different now than a few years ago, for obvious reasons. Heh. Really weird.

Anyway, the game has the usual high WadjetEye production qualities; good soundtrack, great voiceovers, nice bonus content in the form of developer commentaries, artwork and bloopers, high polish; and I've already been a fan of Francisco Gonzalez' and Ben Chandler's work during their freeware AGS days, so it was a good team up. I really enjoyed the pixel art, but not just Ben's sprites and backgrounds, the character portraits were especially stunning (unfortunately I don't remember the name of the artist right now, but he's one to look out for, too).

The gameplay was mostly focused on advancing the story without too many interruptions. There were a couple of puzzles, but they were almost all solved very quickly and easily, nothing really challenging if you've played P&C adventures before, and mostly quite obvious if you just examine every hotspot and talk with all the characters. I didn't have to use any kind of walkthrough and I felt like making progress all the time. Which in my book is not a bad thing though. I think I actually prefer this approach to me constantly getting stuck, having to rack my brain over artificial obstacles and obscure moon logic puzzles, and eventually spoiling the fun by consulting walkthroughs.

The plot was okay, full of tropes and therefor rather predictable most of the times, and not everything always added up as completely believable, a few things were a bit too simple for the heavy theme, but the setting was interesting enough, the dialogues were well written, and I thought the story-telling was pretty good in general. I liked how you learned about story and setting bit by bit, just by being thrown into it, examining things, talking to people, without any tedious lore dumps or long introductions.

What felt a bit odd was that it seemed like a game predestined for tough decisions, choices and consequences, and also suspense and tension, but instead, almost all of the story was set, fixed, completely linear, and because of that there was no real threat to make any wrong choices either, because it's not in the hands of the player. At times, this also had the potential to create a certain disconnect between me, the player, and the character I was playing, because I would make the character act differently than I would have acted in her place, just because there was no other choice in order to advance the story (there is only one situation mid-game where you get an actual choice, and then two more at the very end, but apart from the last one which triggers three different endings, they don't have actual consequences either (other than how they make you feel about the heroine of the story). What *did* surprise me occasionally was how dark and brutal the story (and the characters' actions) could get, and I thought the game sometimes treated it a bit too casually, only partially acknowledging the severity of it all.

But gameplay and story managed to engage me enough to play through the game in three evenings, depite it being a longer game than I anticipated. And all in all, I enjoyed it.

Toren

I was very disappointed by this one. Deep inside there might be an idea for a good game, but in the current state (which probably won't change anymore), it's not much more than a prototype full of bugs, bad design choices and one of the worst camera perspectives I've ever encountered in a game. Story also is very bad and full of pseudo-philosophical nonsense.

To say something nice at the end: I liked the music. So probably buying the soundtrack would be a much better idea than buying the game.


Evoland 2

No longer just a walk through the RPGs history in videogames. Instead it introduces many more elements from different genres. There are sections including elements from shooters, platform games, brawling, beat 'em up and many more. There's even a card collecting/deck-building game included.

Story is also much more complex than in the first game, but sometimes also much more confusing (which seems to be a typical thing with time travel stories).

Not sure if it is the better game of the the two Evoland games, but for sure it is the one with more variety.


Braveland Pirate

If you played Braveland and Braveland Wizard, you know what to expect. Casual turn-based battles and a light-hearted, family friendly story. Not a bad, but it also doesn't introduce any new elements. Instead it even re-uses enemy troops from the former games which doesn't always work very well with the general pirate theme.


Nightmares from the Deep 2: The Siren's Call

A very good hidden object game. Good story and cutscenes and a nice variety of puzzles. I've completed the game and the bonus adventure and never got bored. Looking forward to play the last one in the series.

Complete list of finished games in 2020

The Rebirth / The Reaper (AGS)

Two free AGS games created by Francisco Gonzalez (The Rebirth) and Ben Chandler (The Reaper) for the One Room One Week competition in 2013, while they were working on Shardlight. They tell two short stories set in the same world but before the events of the commercial game and could be seen as unofficial prequel/origin demos. The main game actually refers to what happens in them at some points, although a few things have changed during development, so there are small deviations. They were okay. Naturally, pretty simple and not on par with the quality of the main game, but interesting enough. I think I might have played them before the release of Shardlight already, but revisiting them now, after my playthrough of the main game definitely brought in a new angle.

Finished a few ones since last post:
- Crysis 2: An average shooter. Nothing bad but nothing really excellent.
- Keep in Mind Remastered: Nothing to say about, already forgot everything.
- The Adventure Pals: An excellent platformer. I did not expect anything from it but really liked it.
- Stasis: An interesting story and setting but the puzzles are average.
- Sherlock Holmes : Le Secret de la Boucle d’Argent: A below average point'n click.
- Little Misfortune: An excellent interactive story. Not for depressive people though.

Full list here.

Stikbold! A Dodgeball Adventure

This was pretty fun. I actually played through most of it four years ago and then left the story mode at level 10 of 12, but today I picked it up again, finished the boss fight plus the two bonus levels. The story mode is rather short, too. Looks like, all in all, I only spent 2 hours on these 12 levels, and I probably repeated some of them a few times, too. I didn't bother to get all of the achievements and bonus challenges though, I finished at about 80% completion. Anyway, not much to say about the game, other than that I quite enjoyed the silly art style, story, and Danglish voice-overs, as well as the funky music and the simple but very entertaining gameplay.