Dishonored (Definitive Edition). Another one of Arkane's Looking Glass tributes, this one especially heavy on the Thief influences. You're the bodyguard of the empress of a shitty steampunk (whale-oil-punk?) fantasy land, but she gets killed and you're framed for the crime. You're busted out of prison to help rescue the empress's heir and at the same time this guy called the Outsider, who is like if Satan joined a boy band, gives you superpowers to help you out. So you're mostly sneaking around but you can do crazy magic things like teleporting as long as your mana holds up, but unlike Thief, you're pretty good in a fight and don't have to reload if you're discovered by too many people.

It's pretty good. I find that although Arkane doesn't have quite the same magic as the Looking Glass games did, I appreciate that they're at least trying to keep such games alive. One of the first things I did after starting was to switch off the objective markers and I found that the levels were mostly intuitive enough that I didn't have trouble finding my way to where I needed to go. Levels are open enough for you to use reasonably different approaches through them, although there were numerous instances in which I would try to blink somewhere only to find that the game wouldn't allow me despite the target being well within range - basically it was putting up invisible walls or ceilings to make sure I didn't do something it didn't want me doing. But you have plenty of powers and gadgets to keep you engaged.

I did a ghost run for the main game, then loosened up a lot for the DLC and left significantly more dead bodies behind, but even so apparently I didn't kill enough people in the DLC for the game to raise my chaos rating.

There are some aspects in which the game seems like it's going through the motions, such as how your guy is basically an assassin/spy, but the game litters the levels with random crap for you to loot. I wasn't under the impression that my guy is a thief, so why all the valuable stuff to tempt me? Presumably it's because Thief did it that way and you need some way to raise money to buy crap between levels as the people sending you on the missions sure don't seem interested in paying you. There are also a few audio logs (not many but some) and lots of books full of lore to click on, most of which are overwritten and not very interesting.

Visually it's very nice - from a distance it looks relatively realistic, but up close the graphics have a painterly effect that offsets whatever seams might show. It holds up very well. The aesthetics are immediately recognizable as the Half-Life 2 Guy's work, especially those guys on the mechanical stilts. I kept wishing the game would explain why all the women in the world exclusively wore pants, but it never did. Maybe I missed something. Arkane is generally good with gameplay but not nearly as much with their storytelling.

Well, I forget the total time of the first playing for it was 10 years ago or so.
This (almost finished) playing time is about 30h or so?
But I think this game provides so excellent battle experience that is worth every hour.

OK, thanks!

Steamworld Dig 2

Took me 13 1/2h to complete it at 100% which is not very long as I'm a rather slow a gamer and not very good at this kind of games. It shouldn't have been much longer though, because while fun the game certainly lacks variety and becomes a bit monotonous after a while. I didn't find it very difficult either (apart from a very few frustrating scenes) which means that some people may find this game too easy. Sound is ok, graphics are fine, gameplay is fun if played in shorter sequences. That whas a neat freebie and I will certainly pickup the first part of the game at some point. 7/10

A double report for two more playthroughs to the end (number 4 and 5) :)

4 - February 3, 19:30 – I have started and finished my "lost" copy of Journey on my PS3. It was just a very short and chilled playthrough, where I tried to get as much trophies as possible. Of course, because it is almost two years, when I played it last time on PS4, I completely forgot few locations of some glyphs and symbols :) . But despite of that, I was able to get 7 trophies in this run.

5 - February 4, 11:00 – Another playthrough of Journey on my PS3 is behind me. The plan was to get some missing collectibles and to get the “surfing” trophy at the Sunken City area. And of course, I missed one collectible again, due to my clumsiness

This week i´ve finished two fan adventure games and both have one thing in common, are made by only one person. And are free!

Cirque de Zale
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/377-cirque-de-zale/
A short p&c adventure, about 5 hours. The game is a tribute of Monkey Island and Simon the Sorcerer. I knew about this game in the 2004 thanks to The Inventory (most veteran adventurers will know about this fan pdf magazine), but only played when i noticed that has a Spanish translation. Who wants to be a circus owner? Played in Scummvm on mobile phone.

The Infinity String
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/901-infinity-string/
For fans ofThe Dig. It´s quite long, about 10-15 hours. A lot of puzzles and two possible endings. You need to investigate a ruins following the steps of an ancient civilization. Played on Windows 7.

2022

I unironically played through Super 3D Noah's Ark. The game obviously is a joke, but I got some nice " exploring 90's shareware-disc" vibes from it, that I quite enjoyed.

Tortured Hearts I. (NWN EE)

Review here

Dark Water's Edge (NWN EE)

Review here

She Sees Red (Switch)

What to do with 500 Nintendo Rewards points before they expire? Cash them on an FMV interactive movie on sale, that's what. Game play is exactly as expected, it's a short CYOA movie. Unlike the old days in the 90's when they were first trying to do these types of games, this one is actually well made- in that it is professionally filmed and voice acted. The game is Russian and I played it in Russian with English subtitles because I loath dubbing and the mismatched lip syncing that results, especially for live actor video. The story is a short murder mystery set in a nightclub.

It was enjoyable and short and ran perfectly fine on the Switch using headphones.

Shin Megami Tensei V (Switch)

I played it to the Break the Throne ending, taking just under 80 hours for a thorough exploration play through. I found most items and did almost all side quests and finished up at level 84 after the final boss fight for that ending. I've since looked up what is needed for the secret ending and I'm only missing a couple of late game side quests, but I'm going to go for that when I get around to NG+, since that ending has a super boss that is still way above my level- but should be easier by the end of NG+.

Technically this latest in the core SMT series has moved to Unreal Engine. Not sure why, since the Switch doesn't handle Unreal well and this game does have its performance issues when exploring parts of the world- making the camera movement sluggish at times, especially trying to pan around to see incoming flying enemies. But at it heart this is still a turn based game- so performance problems are not game destroying.

The core SMT games are about hardcore game play mechanics, not social relations or story or silly characters- that's what the Persona spinoffs are for. In that regard SMT V is a winner and worthy of the series for sure. It's combat system is deep, tactical and gets difficult. It's not just about hitting things, you have to master the use of buffs and debuffs and build yourself a team of demons that can handle a wide variety of scenarios. Whilst I'd still rate Octopath Traveler as having better actual combat mechanics, SMT V is still better overall because of the depth of character building and demon summoning and fusing. The options to fine tune both your own and your demons builds is staggering. Japanese RPG's like this still make even the most mechanically hardcore Western RPG's feel like they're made for preschoolers in comparison.

The underlying systems however do not preclude this being a game for anyone to play. The normal difficulty requires careful party building, a sound understanding of the systems, and grinding at parts of the story. But you can switch to two lower difficulties whenever you want, or just play for the story and not have to delve too deeply into the mechanics under everything. Your choice. Or do what I did. Play on normal (or harder if you want) and drop the difficulty for when you want to grind for levels or collect demons- dropping to casual difficulty is a huge time saver for grinding. Then you can put the difficulty back up when you return to the story. The options are there.

An excellent game, that I'll be coming back to sometime to play NG+ and get the secret ending.

Zen Chess: Mate in Two (2019) (Linux/Proton)

Nice! We need more chess games, definitely. It's simply 150 "mate in two" puzzles – good luck with them. What I liked and what's wrong is similar to the previous one (Zen Chess: Mate in One). If you like chess, it's still decent way to practice, somehow different than most of online platforms offering the same.

It took me about 2 hours to complete. Some of these puzzles were smart and I've realized I probably would not be able to find these mates in my real games :D

Works fine under Linux (Steam Proton).

List of all games completed in 2022.

Contrast (XSX Game Pass)

I played the Xbox 360 version years ago, this time I replayed it with the XB1 version. I still think the same now as I did the first time- a really good puzzle platformer with a pretty unique game play mechanic in the way you explore a 3D world and switch into a 2D shadow world to platform on the shadows. So you can move and adjust the 3D world to make 2D platforms to reach your goals. It's short, but has a good story as long as you pickup and read all of the easy to find collectibles that explains a lot of it. I'd like a bigger and better sequel using the same ideas, but Compulsion are busy on other stuff for Microsoft now.

Telling Lies (XSX Game Pass)

I haven't played an FMV game for years and then I do two in a single week. In this one you basically sift through and view a series of illegally gotten video files from the NSA, involving 4 main people. To unlock the videos you have to pull key words to use in the search engine. Eventually the entire story all comes together. It's an artistic idea for sure and the story was okay. But some of the games mechanics were annoying- like does the video scrubbing need to be so slow? And unless I missed something really obvious, there is not instant way to skip back to the start of a video, you have to scrub back. It was an okay experience, and quite unique...but also felt more tedious than it needed to be.