SnowRunner (XSX Game Pass)

I've completed the base game (not the 10 DLC expansion regions!), all contracts (which is essentially the story path), all tasks, all competitions, recovered all vehicles, fixed and returned all infrastructure to operational state, found all truck upgrades and activated all watchtowers. So basically, I've 100% completed the base game with the exception of around 6 really easy achievements that I'm setting aside to get on days when I need an easy and quick daily achievement for MS rewards. It took well over 100 hours. HLTB says 200 hours for full completion, so this is one of the rare instances where I'm faster than most people.

Obviously, I liked it then. That's an understatement, it goes up there with my favorite games of all time- it's hard to compare a working sim to things like Dark Souls of course, but SnowRunner has to be my all-time favorite simulator. It's a sequel to Mudrunner, but that is also an understatement. I enjoyed Mudrunner, it was my surprise hit of the year, back around 2018 or so. Mudrunner had about 6 large maps and were all similar- and all you did was open the map with watchtowers and deliver the maps quota of logs. SnowRunner on the other hand has three regions of 4 maps each and chock full of activities. First you scout out the map in a light vehicle and unlock the watchtowers. Then you repair the infrastructure like washed out bridges to open up the main roads for your heavy hauler. Then you complete the maps contracts which usually involve delivering supplies and materials to build something like an oil derrick. Along the way there are countless smaller activities, such as rescuing trucks stuck in the swamps etc. Most maps finish up with a "boss fight" delivery that will usually involve some top-heavy oversized load like an oil platform that needs to be delivered through some horrendous terrain.

The maps start of easy in Michigan then move to frozen Alaska (the only place where there is actually snow in SnowRunner) and end up in the boggy ass end of the earth in Taymyr Russia. The final contracts in Russia are over the crappiest terrain imaginable and you need every trick in the book that you've learnt- such as side winching your trailer around off camber corners to prevent it from tipping, all whilst up to the cabin in mud. Finishing big end game contracts really does feel like defeating the final boss in Dark Souls.

Obviously, as much as I love this game, it's not for everyone. Most people will also not play it straight through like I did- most would play it as a chill experience from time to time between other games. For anyone that is wondering if it's for them, then Mudrunner is probably a good bet to see if it's your thing- it's way cheaper and shorter but is basically still the same idea. Then you will know if you want SnowRunner. Also, if you have been collecting all the free Epic games- then you already have Mudrunner, it was a free Epic game a few years back and it has relatively low system requirements- so give it a try.

Teenagent

This game is middle of the road, not bad, not good.
The graphics are ok and most actions, and item uses, have their own dedicated animations.
The music is repetitive, but not annoying and the characters, despite being bland, are fine for what game they’re in.
The story is a basic spy comedy, heavy on puns and references, with some jokes working and some not.
The big problem here are the puzzles. Some are fine and logical, but most of them are devoid of all common sense. Item combinations can be random or unintuitive and some things just happen out of the blue.
Overall, a mixed bag, but I can’t argue with the price.

I completely agree with you, KruhLatry. I played Teenagent back in the good old DOS days and I liked it. All in all, the game is okay and it's worth a try.

Is there really anything to this, or is it just general advice because there are licences involved?

Just a general advice, do not worry (for now), sorry for that.

Hero of the Kingdom II

Had dismissed these games for being casual, but really liked the look (and still do, nice graphics), so decided to grab it now since it was free and I must say it was better than I thought it'd be. For a casual game, of course, and not keen on the hidden object part (and one quest where I couldn't possibly know that I was in fact looking for that tiny, tiny item got me searching for a hint after I did everything else) but at least it meant I could finish something again. Does seem that once you can sail off the mainland they started rushing, much more detail there, and a quest log would have been useful, but I guess it works like this too. And it's no stress, no risk, can't get stuck or defeated, just move along. And if you take 100% completion as meaning getting all achievements too, that doesn't necessarily mean finding absolutely everything, there are often at least a few more than needed. Rather unpleasant that you can finish the game without really meaning to, but at least after you get thrown back to the main menu you can just continue again, and there's even dialogue that plays as soon as you do, the end of the cutscene if you will, after which you can finish anything you had left unfinished. No indication that you actually 100%ed everything once you do though. Also didn't like the lack of free saving, just automatic when you return to the main menu. Granted, since you can't be stuck or lose, there's no real need to ever go back to any earlier save, but still makes me feel really uneasy.

Heavy Rain is simply great experience, which I fully enjoyed since the beginning. To be honest, I would never guess who is origami killer, but it does not matter. There is a lot of choices which have impact for the rest of the game, not just some one time events. Looking forward to second play-through in near future.

Psychonauts. I picked up Psychonauts 2 in the sale but realized I didn't remember the first game as well as I'd like, so I decided to replay this again. Yup, it's still really good. Technically, it's starting to age a little bit in the sense that you might need to do some stuff to make sure it doesn't crash during cutscenes, and there was an odd thing where it often didn't want to load for me, as I'd click the .exe sometimes 3 or 4 times until it decided to boot up.

In every other way, it's still excellent. The art style has kept it from aging like many other games from its era, and the storytelling is really sharp. There's a lot to discover (I think I found some interactions that were new to me in this run) and everything just flows smoothly from one level/setpiece to the next and the characters are a lot of fun. You always feel like you're doing or seeing something new despite the gameplay itself never changing too much. Lots of irreverent humor about mental illness that...well, we'll see how the sequels handle the subject.

At the time it came out, the main knock on it was that it was yet another 3D platformer with tons of crap to collect but I don't play those types of games very much anymore, so it feels kind of refreshing to go back to something like that and it's not like most of the stuff is that hard to find. There are a couple of levels, particularly the tighter sections of the final level, where it feels like the game starts to overreach itself as the controls and camera start screwing you over a little, but it's nothing so severe that it ruins the experience.

Pillars of Eternity Definitive Edition, Sept 4 (GOG)-Haven't played a big, epic RPG in a while and I had some fun with this one. It plays like a Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale. There were some interesting roleplaying opportunities. The stronghold activities were interesting but rather repetitive although I liked the dungeon below the stronghold. The companions were pretty good but I preferred the stories and quests of the base game companions. In fact other than higher level loot and more content I didn't care for the expansions too much, not that they were bad they just felt out of place to me. I think the level cap was too low. My PC reached the max level with about 15 hours to go and my last companion maxed out with about 7 hours left. I also didn't like having to micro-mange all the spellcasters so much but I feel like that's been true since the early days. Still a fun game if you like this style of RPG.

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The Scheme. An early Metroid clone for the PC88. You control a guy who has to destroy some great evil infesting the land, the regular thing, so you explore an underground lair, fighting monsters and getting power-ups that let you enter other areas until you finally get to the end-boss. It's the kind of game I find compulsively playable because it's so easy to keep running forward blasting stuff and seeing what new stuff you can find, although it's rather simpler than Metroid was. There aren't that many items to discover beyond health or weapon energy power-ups (e.g., the most noteworthy is probably a pair of high-jump boots) and the flip-screen map is pretty easy to learn, although consulting a map is sometimes a good idea. It has the classic 8-bit Japanese design mentality in that you'll want to keep an eye out for random walls you can run through and you should absolutely shoot everything because if you find that hitting something makes a noise, that means you'll probably get something good if you keep shooting it. Controls are really simple - run, jump, shoot. That's it.

So the game is fine but nothing extraordinary, but its secret weapon is that it has a soundtrack by Yuzo Koshiro that was done right as he was really hitting his stride as a composer, and the PC88 as it happens had really good sound capabilities (offsetting the garish graphics), not so different from the Mega Drive. When you boot up the game, it gives you an option between "normal" or "special" music but this is slightly deceptive. Although it's true that the special option was designed for upgraded soundboards, the real reason for the choice is that Koshiro was apparently having so much fun making music that he just did two full-length soundtracks which are both outstanding. The conventional wisdom is that you should play the game twice to experience both, but I just switched back and forth whenever I booted up the game, hearing what the same areas sounded like when I would explore them with each soundtrack playing. Even if you don't play the game, you might want to look up the soundtrack online to listen to it.

Metal Hellsinger, Sept 8 (Xbox Gamepass)-This game tries very hard but I don't know why or what for. It's ok but not nearly as fun as Hi-Fi Rush, didn't have nearly as good a soundtrack as Brutal Legend, and played a lot like a musical Painkiller which is a terrible game. At 8 levels and 4-5 hours its about 3 levels and 2 hours too long.

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Beat The Sinking City on PS5 last night. This is a game that's intrigued me since I first heard about it. I actually almost played it two years ago or so but then I delayed it when I read that a PS5 version is coming. I don't regret waiting because the last gen version supposedly suffered from terrible load times and a few other issues which are simply gone now.

Anyway, it's a very interesting game. It's an open-world game where the core gameplay is about detective work instead of fighting hordes of monsters and the combat that's there is inspired by survival horror games. It has a bit of a reputation of having "no handholding" and being a bit "hardcore". All of this made the game sound pretty attractive to me in an age where most sandbox games are glorified checklists where you just go from marker to marker. And it is set in the Cthulhu mythos (which I admittedly don't know very well) with the hero being a private eye who's suffering from terrible visions and is trying to stop his descent into madness by traveling to the bizarre flooded town of Oakmont which is somehow connected to his condition.

My first impressions were pretty amazing. The game has a great atmosphere and just oozes weirdness. It's a town where fishlike "innsmouthers" live alongside humans, monsters kill people in their sleep, the locals have bizarre customs and beliefs and one of the first characters you meet is a man from a powerful family who has the face of a gorilla for some reason. There's a state of desperation and distrust with people just randomly mugging each other, racial tensions brewing between the humans and the innsmouthers, a myriad of abandoned houses telling tragic stories - and a good chunk of the city can only be traveled by boat as a flood has turned it into a lovecraftian Venice. Just being in this town has been a morbid joy that kept me engaged for many hours.

That said: after a strong start it sadly also turns out that many of the things that are supposed to make this game stand out are pretty underwhelming. The "no handholding" in the navigation really just means that you have to place markers yourself based on addresses provided in text form. That's just an additional step, not a different approach to navigating an open world. There is a higher difficulty level where you have fewer pointers but it just seems like a worse UI, not deeper gameplay. The investigative gameplay is trivial and painfully repetitive. You're constantly led to points of interest such as crime scenes which are all based on just a handful of buildings which only differ in details like the decorations and passages but obviously follow the same tiny set of layouts. There you just use a bunch of items until the next step of the quest is unlocked. Often investigations will also involve solving a minigame like putting flashbacks in order, connecting facts in a "mind palace" or finding information in a records room by choosing the correct 3 filters - all of these mini games are trivial and the mind palace feels weirdly glitchy. In the end the quests generally amount to little more than fetch quests. So yeah, disappointingly this "detective open world game" from the developers of the Sherlock Holmes games somehow fails to provide better detective gameplay than Assassin's Creed Unity and Syndicate or The Witcher 3.

And while combat is relatively rare, the idea was clearly that it's a survival horror game. While investigating abandoned houses, monsters will often appear out of nowhere - there are also infested areas where monsters walk the streets (though you almost never have to enter these). In theory supplies are rare, the game even acknowledges this by the town's inhabitants using bullets as currency and you're supposed to sometimes run instead of fight. In practice the city is flooded with containers that just refill if you gain the slightest bit of distance and usually I could not even receive quest rewards because my pockets were overflowing anyway. The only meaningful rewards are XP with which you can unlock some skills but those are restricted to stat bonuses and most of them just don't matter. And the combat itself can only be described as functional. It's a poor man's Resident Evil 4 that's neither great nor terrible. One touch that I enjoyed is a madness meter that's going up while seeing monsters (or other disturbing things) and which will make further monsters appear if it drops too far so you're pressured to kill monsters quickly or manage madness by looking away or injecting some stuff that restores your sanity. In practice it's little more than a gimmick but it's something original that works. So yeah, this entire survival aspect kinda doesn't work the way it should and in the end it's just there as filler as you're doing the detective stuff but: it's not terrible.

So, at this point it may sound more like the stinking city. Yeah, it is a game where you just keep doing the same stuff in samey locations with nothing of interest ever happening during your travels (and thank God for fast travel which takes like 2-3 seconds on PS5). BUT: I still enjoyed my time with the game thanks to the writing and voice acting and interesting moral choices. Not all characters are particularly complex or interesting but the game's universe and lore definitely are (at least to me) and just unravelling the core mystery and learning things about the town's inhabitants and their beliefs was rewarding enough to me to just keep going. Admittedly I found the ending underwhelming but the road there was satisfying. Every day I was genuinely looking forward to continue playing the game after work and honestly, many "better" games fail to achieve that. So in spite of all of the game's flaws and the disappointment it's still a 7/10 game to me.

Oh yeah, even though the game originally had manual saving they removed it in the next gen version (which is the only case I know where a developer has retroactively limited saving). It's a weird choice but honestly, I found that it works this game. There's no permadeath, if you die you just respawn but there's no way to undo dialogue choices and it did add a weight to the game that I greatly appreciate. The game does keep the final checkpoint after the credits have rolled, though, so you can at least check out the different endings without having to start over for each one.

Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade (PS5 PS Plus)

By far the longest movie I've played this year. I'd summarize this game as the bare skeleton of the first 5 hours of the original FF VII blended with modern COD campaigns, except for 50 hours instead of 8. In other words, it's non-stop (except for a couple of well-defined downtime chapters): run from one spectacular set piece full of cutscenes to the next- explosions and shit blowing up everywhere, why am I here again? Who cares? Who are they? Who cares just beat them and let them run away so they can come back and fight you again later, more things blowing up, more cutscenes, more boss fights, scripted boss fights, with cutscenes, no matter how hard you smack down the boss he will kick your as in a cutscene and run away, more stuff blowing up, who the hell is that guy on the motorcycle? who cares? Just defeat him and then let him get away like usual, more boss fights, and here's some more boss fights that make absolutely no contextual sense whatsoever, but no he wasn't the main boss because there's still 5 more!!! no save points in-between , what happens if I quit now? will I have to restart from the start? I don't know, better keep playing just to be safe! more fucking explosions! What the hell is that I'm fighting and what the hell has it got to do with the story? I don't know! What....that's it? That's the end? What happened? Did we win? How are they even going to do the sequel?

Upon reflection, I probably should go back and remove all punctuation so that it is all one continuous sentence without breaks to give a proper feel for what the actual game feels like.

I didn't like the original game much, my favorite FF's are X for its combat system and character building system, XII for it's more interesting political story and a half decent real time combat system. FF VII Remake looks okay, but not as good as I was expecting either. The main characters and cutscenes look great but everything else either looks rushed or maybe it was a design choice to make the main characters and spectacles stand out more? The combat system started out shit, got better once I got a handle on it and then got shit again once I realized how broken the AI is both for your own team and the enemy- your own team don't do anything for themselves, and the enemy just switch their aggro to whatever character you control as soon as you switch. All of this is accomplished with a camera that is way too close to the action to be able to get a good enough overview of what is happening- and that is even after going to the options menu and setting the camera view back as far as allowed.

I'll say this though, the characters were okay, played their roles well enough. Except for Coud who was a useless dweeb, both in and out of combat. I mostly controlled Tifa for melee because of her awesome "tear them a new asshole" attack (sorry can't remember its real name) and Barret for ranged attacks using the Big Bertha weapon because of how fast it built up ATB.

The Intergrade version contains another two chapter where you control Yuffie. Even Yuffie is better than Coud. At least the final cutscenes of the Intermission chapters give a lead in to the next part. Maybe.

I never really expected to like this game, which is why I left it till the last of the Playstation console exclusives that I've been working through on PS Plus (except Returnal- probably a good game but I don't like Roguelikes much), so I got what I was expecting, I guess.

The City of Lost Children

1997 adventure game that released on PC (DOS) and PS1, published by Psygnosis. It was based upon a movie by the masters of French weirdness Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro- a movie I really like, though it's not as good as either Delicatessen or Amelie (which was by Jeunet only). Both the City of Lost Children and Delicatessen are set in a dark unexplained world that looks like Victorian era Paris, where the sun doesn't shine, and food is hard to grow and in short supply. I've often assumed that both movies share the same world, though it's not explicitly stated anywhere.

The game adaptation is clunky as hell and, honestly, I fail to see how anyone that hasn't seen the movie would even make any sense of the story. It works sort of like an adventure game version of early Resident Evil games- fixed rendered screens, often with multiple camera angles to select from, and tank controls. There is no mouse support so finding the items you need requires moving around the screens and just hoping you stumble upon the icon to pick something up- the items often being hidden behind other objects. Honestly, I fail to see how anyone can solve this short adventure without either a walkthrough or brute forcing it by walking around every screen like mowing the grass until you just stumble upon things. Once you find the items the solutions are not difficult and generally hinted at by the people you can talk to.

Objectively, it's a terrible game. For some reason I like it any way, probably because I like the movies of Jeunet & Caro so much and the game does still convey their trademark weirdness quite well. Watch the movies and then decide if you want to endure this game, in that order. Finding either the PC or PS1 versions at a reasonable price is hard though.