Deaths door - 12th Feb 2022
(Donated by @Doc0075; thanks once again Doc!!)

Wow, what a rollercoaster of a journey, loved the ost....my best would have to be the inner furnace music,that sync with the pistons is just *chef's kiss*

story is over, just have some items to collect....


lol, wouldn't have finished it if they had'nt given those checkpoints at the last boss battle ;)

Dagon: by H. P. Lovecraft (2021) (Linux/Wine)

Quite interesting. It's about half an hour of storytelling with little to no interaction, but it's close enough to Lovecraft's atmosphere that it's worth completing. Poor performance under Linux/Wine.

List of all games completed in 2022.

I've just finished second playthrough of Tales of Arise Demo on my PS4. I just needed some break in between of my simracing trainings, so I took something short and easy. This time, my character of choice was Kisara.

All of games finished this year can be found here :)

Project Wingman (XSX Game Pass)

It's Indie Ace Combat, and that's no bad thing- as this type of game isn't exactly a saturated market. It ran flawlessly and looks great, especially considering it appears to be only a three man production team and one of those being the music composer. It has a 21 mission campaign and a second mode called conquest which is a sort of rogue-like mode. The missions do all start to feel similar though as the goal is always simply to wipe out all the enemy forces. But otherwise it plays like the Ace Combat games that it's clearly based on- but half the price. The game is even available on GOG.

I just beat Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on PS5. This marks my second (and probably final) playthrough of this game.

SotN is a legendary title, the one that established Metroid style platformers as an actual genre that we (stupidly) call Metroidvania today. I first played the game about ten years ago and I was quite blown away by it back then. It probably helps that that was before there were literally zillions of Metroidvanias on the market and there were fewer titles to compare it to.

Playing the game now I still appreciate a lot about it but in retrospect the game also isn't all that great in some regards. I'm not a very big fan of the series overall, with the first games just being unenjoyable to me with their clunky controls and unfair level design, but what is undeniably great about it is the look and feel. The imaginative gothic horror pixel art accompanied by kick ass music are simply awesome. And personally I consider the atmosphere and the setting and the player fantasy vastly superior to Metroid's. And where Metroid follows a fairly minimalistic design philosophy SotN is riddled with tons of unique memorable sights and places and exploring Dracula's castle is a far more rewarding experience to me than navigating all the tunnel complexes and whatnot in the Metroid games. And even visually generic areas tend to at least provide really original enemy designs. The castle is also much easier to navigate as a result. It's honestly difficult to get stuck in SotN but you still get that satisfying loop of gaining new powers that allow you to reach new areas (though I've found most of these powers a bit underwhelming).

Where SotN fundamentally standards apart from most other Metroidvanias is that it has full-on JRPG mechanics. Besides the Metroid-like progression there are also various stats here that get levelled up by killing enemies and there are tons of weapons and armor pieces to pick up in addition to the series' standard sub weapons and consumable items. What's cool is that the items aren't just generic loot that differs in strength but are riddled with unique characteristics, some of which aren't apparent at first, like e.g. a sword that becomes more powerful the more blood it has spilled or a piece of armour that provides better protection the more rooms you have discovered. Then many weapons even have secret combo attacks. And you can learn spells that are executed by performing fairly complicated inputs which may kill hard to reach enemies or heal you. On top of that you eventually unlock Familiars, little sidekicks with different abilities that level up along with you and can also grow extremely powerful. All this RPG stuff is what caught me off-guard and truly impressed me about the game back then - it made SotN feel so advanced over Metroid.

The thing is that the RPG mechanics also make SotN a worse platform game. The game is brutally misbalanced! Most of the time you will be utterly overpowered, enemies will often remove only 1 HP at a time and go down from a single hit. But another enemy in the same area may suddenly deal substantial damage and kill you in a few hits if you're not careful. And even bosses tend to go down in just a few hits, before you've even had time to work out their pattern. The result is quite frankly pretty awkward. On one hand I appreciate that SotN is a relatively casual experience, on the other it kinda sucks that you barely have to master anything here. The sheer amount of unique content kept the game from getting boring to me (well, at least until the final parts) but it wasn't nearly as captivating and satisfying an experience as I wanted it to be. In retrospect it's a game that I'd definitely rather play for the content and atmosphere than the actual gameplay.

It's still an important milestone game and there's a ton to appreciate here but I must also say that the genre has come a long way since SotN. It's still worth playing but hardly one of the best Metroidvanias anymore (at least speaking strictly in terms of gameplay).

Chrono Trigger, Feb 13 (PS1)-I've been having computer troubles lately so I haven't posted much but I beat a few games over the last few days. First up is Chrono Trigger.

I was a little disappointed with Chrono Trigger. Large chunks of the game felt like a slog although looking at the save files I was only playing it for about 28ish hours. The game also felt a little obtuse in that I often wasn't sure where to go or what to do so liberal use of a walkthru was needed. It probably doesn't help that I played in over the span of about 8 months. I did like the combat although it was frequently too easy but that may have been because of the walkthru hints. The most annoying thing was that when I beat the game it wouldn't let me create a system save file due to no slots open. I'm not sure what happened there. Maybe I need to delete some of the game saves. So that means I'll need to beat it again if I ever want to try new game+ and see the other endings. As I rarely replay games and I wasn't too thrilled with this one on the first passthru it will probably never happen though. Chrono Trigger feels a lot like a game you play for hours as a kid learning all of its secrets because you probably only got a few new games a year and you had to make them last. As an adult I've see enough and I'm ready to move on from it.

Full List

Growbot (2021) (Linux)
(game received as a gift – thank you, Doc!)

I've got a bit mixed feelings about this one. I liked the visuals, but didn't liked the sound and music, which is quite a disadvantage for a game based on music-based puzzles. I kind of liked the story, but I really didn't liked how it's written and how it's complicated when it might be much simpler and charming. I've got a lot troubles explaining my kids who is who and what's going on here. A lot of abstract jokes, similar characters, non-obvious instructions – it all makes the game not perfect for kids, who should be considered as a target for the game. It required some patience, but it created two nice Sunday gaming sessions for me and my daughters, which was awesome, of course :)

List of all games completed in 2022.

Banner of the Maid (XSX)

Fire Emblem, but set in an alternate fantasy early Napoleonic era where you play as Napoleons sister. I really enjoyed it a lot, but then I really like turn based tactical RPG's and strategy games with RPG elements like Jagged Alliance. I think it was originally on Switch and then moved onto all major current platforms. It's developed by a Chinese studio, but is well localized into English for the text which makes up most of the game- though the in battle, voiced battle cries, are still in Chinese.

As a cheap alternative to Fire Emblem, it is a really great game. Mechanically it basically copy pastes straight from pre Three Houses Fire Emblem- so Banner of the Maid still retains the older rock , paper, scissors relationship between the various units. The difficulty ramps up over the 29 mission main campaign and you have the option of playing repeatable side battles to level your units to flatten the difficulty curve as you wish. There are also hidden side missions that generally require you to find items on the battlegrounds to unlock. Plus, there are also choices to make during the campaign that seemingly gain, or lockout, various commanders for your army. There's enough here that I will most likely play NG+ just to explore some of the options and find more of the hidden items.

The missions and the way their difficulty evolves is generally really good. Early on I was worried that too many battles were going to be time limited, which results in a more puzzle like game instead of strategy. But as the game went on, I feel they got the balance about right, with only the occasional turn limited battle. Though, I do feel the devs pulled the old "scripted reinforcements up your rear" trick a few too many times- so often that I came to expect and plan for it. But overall, it's really well done and was very cheap on a recent sale too. It took me somewhere between 40-50 hours and that was doing plenty of optional side battles.

This would also count for the current time travel thread. Maybe not intended, but hey :)

When The Past Was Around

Pretty similar to Florence, except that here the loss of the partner is caused by death and the relationship is portrayed as purely harmonic, without conflicts. Seemed a bit one-sided to me, too, as the lost partner is this creative musician and the girl's role is more or less confined to adoring him. The art is beautiful and the music is quite nice as well, if a bit repetitive at times, and the puzzles were easy enough to be solved without walkthrough; even when I felt stuck for a moment, in the end I was always able to figure it out on my own. They are predominantly code puzzles of a similar type, but I did not mind that with the short duration of the game (roughly 2 hours). Otherwise it might have become a bit repetitive, too. But there was some variety in it. All in all, I enjoyed the game for its casual puzzling experience, art and atmosphere, but it did not have much of an emotional impact on me. The story was a bit too simple for that, and the theme too common in indie games by now.

Torin´s Passage

By Al Lowe, it has a great cartoon style, is like a Disney movie, even in the story. Good adventure. Takes me about 15 hours to finish it. One less to play! :)

Full 2022 list

Star Wars: Rogue Squadron. I played about 90 percent of this about a year and a half ago, then drifted away after getting stuck on the second to last mission. I thought I'd give it another shot and within a couple of hours I finally eeked out a victory against that jackoff Moff Seerdon and his ridiculously overpowered shuttle. The actual final mission was a total cakewalk compared to that one, in which you have to destroy some over-sized hovercraft that the game unconvincingly claims are even more powerful than the Death Star but are easier to defeat than the AT-ATs from much earlier in the same game.

I do like this game, but I've always found it to have rough edges like the uneven difficulty, the mediocre voice acting (if I was Mark Hamill, I'd be offended by their casting for Luke's voice), and the fact that it has real trouble conjuring up the sense of speed that is one of the signature elements of the franchise. You're flying stuff like X-wings and landspeeders but somehow they come across like helicopters that had their hovering ability removed. Playing it today, it also has gained the additional problem of being from an era whose games don't like to play nice with modern controllers. I mostly got it working but it never felt entirely right. But it's a good game for just getting in and blowing up stuff in a popular sci-fi setting, like the X-wing/TIE Fighter games but stripped down for more casual/console players.

There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension
(and the predecessor/demo There Is No Game - Jame Edition 2015)

A point-and-click adventure with a meta theme where the protagonists are the game itself (or rather, the voice of the game) and the disobedient user (slightly reminiscent of The Stanley Parable). Puzzles and humour revolve around classic game mechanics and breaking the fourth wall (by breaking the game).

I'm slightly torn because on the one hand I thought the style was top notch, perfect pixel art presentation, and even though some puzzle solutions became familiar after a while, there was still a good variety and lots of surprises, creative ideas and high quality of polish. On the other hand, the game is supposed to be carried by that voice, which is the voice of the (French) writer himself, and I did not enjoy his voice-acting and his accent at all. It's very divisive - people seem to either love it and find it hilarious or they hate it and find it hard to bear, and I'm closer to the latter camp, because I thought it was overacted and the English pronounciation was so bad that it often sounded forced, wrong on purpose (apologies to the dev if I'm mistaken in that regard, but I've never heard anyone honestly speak English that way, without faking it, not even French or German speakers). And I didn't think it was funny or that it added to the game, the writing and the humour, I thought it distracted from it (others will surely disagree on this though). And while I liked most of the puzzles, the game often oscillated between giving too many hints (unasked) and being totally obscure, leaving me stumped. I got stuck for a while several times, helplessly clicking on everything I could, and it could be frustrating because my pride was preventing me from using the in-game Hint button (although in the last chapter I gave in and looked, once). Including those phases, the game took me about 7 hours to complete, which is a lot for such a concept. I took two longer breaks in between (started it in December last year), and that might be an indication that it was slightly too long or some chapters too similar, but all in all I thought it was an impressive mix of content.

TL:DR
I enjoyed the game in general (certainly more than other meta games like Evoland) and I was even impressed by it at times, but that's despite and not because of the main voiceacting with its terrible accent. I get why the writer may have wanted to do it himself and purposefully flawed, but personally I think it's a pity, because contrary to other players I found it more distracting than amusing, and there are two side characters in the game who have fantastic, professional seeming voiceactors stealing the show from him.

Echo Generation (XSX Game Pass)

Awesome 12 hour turn based Indie RPG, way better than the expectations I had going in. Some say it has inspiration from the classic Earthbound and Mother games, but I haven't played them. Modern inspiration definitely comes from Stranger Things. It's only about 12 hours long, you play as two kids, brother and sister and up to 5 pets that they can recruit for extra abilities. The combat system is most like South Park The Stick of Truth- turn based with very important active time inputs to increase damage and protection. Unlike some that use this type of combat, getting the hang of the active inputs is pretty much crucial to defeating the bosses- so practice. The active inputs varies for every weapon and skill...sometimes simple QTE and sometimes small mini games- it makes your small selection of attacks each feel unique.

The game does very little hand holding, there is no quest log or map markers, but if you are the type to explore every inch of your game world, then you will not get stuck- you can do what I did however, and do parts out of intended order which felt like a difficulty spike, followed by an easier ride when I got back onto the story.

Overall it was an excellent little game with it's own art style and 80-90's humor from the point of view of a couple of kids. Oddly the game appears exclusive right now to Xbox and Win10 Store. Searching on EGS brings no result and Steam says coming 2021...and it's now 2022, I'm sure it will turn up sometime.