The Colonel's Bequest. Another classic Sierra game. I ended up falling a few points shy of the Super Sleuth rating, but I'm fine with that. I've never been too hung up on 100-percenting Sierra games.

It's interesting because although it has some item gathering and puzzle-solving, and you can get yourself killed by doing foolish things, it doesn't really play a lot like Sierra's usual output. The key to the game is just to wander around and trigger events, observing things as much as possible. In that sense it actually plays a bit like the style associated with Japanese adventure games, where you're constantly going back to the same locations and talking to the same people to see if anything different happens. If you're having trouble triggering the clock to move forward, just go back to a location you haven't visited in a while and something will probably happen, and just keep doing this until the game ends.

You do need to be thinking about how things fit together to get the good ending, but it's not especially demanding, the game never requires you to spell out the entire mystery and how everything fits together.

I also really like the ambience of the game, especially with the MT-32 soundtrack. I think they could have gone even more over the top, but it's still a cool setting and a fun bunch of stereotypical characters.

Bio Menace

I decide to try to finish this game on a whim. I once try this permanently free games right after I join GOG, but didn't even pass the first stage. A combination of an unfamiliar keyboard layout and a rather high difficulty design (atleast for me) discouraged me to try finish it

But after trying them again, I managed to finish the fist stage and later the full two episodes. The game feels smooth to play, the difficulty is just right and healing items and life gems are plenty. If you have a full 9 life at the end the final boss battle is no problem.

But not like that in the third and final episode. The designer threw away life gems and made healing items extra rare. Sometimes only 1 available in a stage. That make the 3rd episode really hard and discouraged me to explore a level fully as the potential of losing life not really worth it. Not to mention the designer choosing to spam the worst of all enemies, the spitting snake almost in all stages. I recommend finding all secret level on this episodes as the additional life is really precious.

Tales of Arise, Aug 12 (Xbox Game Pass)-I liked this quite a bit but it has some flaws. The story was good up until the end where it gets ridiculous and it stuck around a little bit too long. Voice acting was excellent and graphics were good. Combat was a chaotic mess. I never really got the hang of the combat and mostly relied on the party and healing items to survive. Although even then the combat was never really difficult just needlessly complicated. There are a lot of cutscenes. Like a huge amount. Like 320 according to the game. And they're not all related to the main quest. In fact most of them are random humorous episodes. And some of them are rather long. And some of them are back to back. I'd often sit thru over an hour of cutscenes between combat. Which wasn't terrible because combat wasn't high on my list for this game. I actually did quite enjoy the cutscenes even if there were probably far too many of them. Looking at combat time vs total game time combat time is about 20-25% of the gameplay and most of the remaining would be cutscenes.

Biggest complaint was how buggy the game was. The first 10 hours it didn't crash once. After that it tended to crash every 30 minutes or so. Sometimes I could play 45 minutes to an hour before a craah sometimes it would crash after less than 10 minutes. It forced me to save every 5 minutes which was really tedious. And I was in a constant state of tension when a cutscene would pop up after a lengthy play session worrying the game would crash. The series of final bosses/battles were rather underwhelming especially the final final boss. The Flower of Nevira quest boss was much more difficult. Lastly, I felt like I was in the end game at about 35 hours but the game really dragged on from there lasting another 17+ hours. I think it really should have wrapped up around 40-45 hours. The extra 7 or so hours could have been condensed quite a bit.

Full List

Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn (PC Game Pass)

This actually turned out to be an awesome game. First of all, do not listen to all the people saying it's a Souls-like. The only aspect of Souls games is the bonfire camp equivalent and the fact that you need to gather your lost XP if you die. You won't die much though, it's not a brutally difficult game at all- I played on the normal difficulty. There is a story mode difficulty if you need, but you don't get achievements for that.

The combat is nothing like a Souls-like experience. This threw me a bit at first, but I really enjoyed it once I got the hang of it and begin getting the useful skills. There is not stamina bar here, you just time attacks and try to counter or dodge enemy attacks. You also get slow loading primary and secondary guns. It's not difficult once you get past the usual learning phase. The biggest help is your godlike sidekick- Enki. He mostly helps you by applying de-buffs to enemies. Unlike most games with sidekicks...Enki is actually quite charismatic and has some really fun dialogue.

The world takes you through three biomes which are semi-open and full of useful secret weapons and upgrades to find. It is very vertical so as to make use of the game's phase jump traversal system. The game can be completed in under 20 hours, though it took me 24 because I was very thorough in my exploration- it is a very fun world to explore. The only criticism I have is that I feel like the game was meant to be a bit longer- the last area feels short and rushed compared to the fully fleshed out previous two areas. On the other hand, it is okay to play a game like this that doesn't go for 60 plus hours.

Had a lot of fun with this overall. It had no performance issues or crashes at all, and it looks respectable. For what amounts to an AA game that is half the price of most AAA games, they did a good job.

Cat Quest

This is on my other store backlog for a while, only trying it our for a few minutes but I abandoned and uninstalled it. But after getting a GOG copy for Cat Quest II form Prime I then give it another try.

The normal game was fun, not overstaying its welcome. Lots of cat puns, the save system is forgiving and the game can choose to be challenging when it wanted to. Ended up finishing it around 10 hours or so with all "normal game" achievement tick-marked.

"So why not getting the rest of them?" I said to myself. It's only 6 and how hard can a mew game (a normal game with challenge modifiers could be. Well for me it's a real steep challenge. I wrongly choose the hardest Level One mods on my first try and it took me a long hours to beat them, let alone the final challenge which is 3 modifiers at the same time. Perhaps it was my lack of skill or perhaps I should play the game with controller because other players and guides said it was harder to play with mouse and keyboard.

Mafia- Definitive Edition (PC Game Pass)

How refreshing to play a remake that actually pays respect to the original game for a change. The original is a classic game with one of the best crime stories in gaming. I'll be the first to admit, however, that the game had a lot of BS when it came to its gameplay. That car park mission for example...or that mission where you collect protection money where I failed because Paulie didn't look both ways before crossing the road and got ran over by a random car and killed- mission restart!
This remake updates the graphics to state of the art for 2020 and takes away all of the janky BS. If you're a sissy, I believe you don't even have to win the race mission.

The city is the same map, the characters are the same people. No gender swaps, no race swaps, no inserted scenes to make people aware of the plight of the transgender immigrant community. The women haven't been uglified, they even got to keep their breasts. No "modern audiencing" here at all- just a classic game brought into the modern era with better gameplay and graphics. Well done to the people that worked on it.

It's an excellent game that has one of the best stories in gaming. It's a simple, straightforward, hard-hitting story about the rabbit hole you go down in organized crime, no silly "Luke I'm your father" plot twists here at all. This series also has one of the best tie-ins between the first and second games. You basically get to play the true ending of Mafia in Mafia 2 as a reward to those that play both games- in Mafia 2 there is a mission that won't mean anything much to you unless you played the first game. Play them both, they are great games.

Dagger of Amon Ra. The sequel to The Colonel's Bequest, but this one has VGA graphics and is somewhat more of a standard point and click adventure. It still has the clock that alerts you to events happening, but there are more inventory-based puzzles than the predecessor. Laura is a newly-hired reporter at a New York newspaper, and her first story is to cover the theft of a dagger looted from an Egyptian tomb. A murderer strikes at the museum where she's covering the Egyptian exhibit opening, so everything is locked down and she starts seeing all the people around her get killed off in amusing ways, so she has to solve the case.

It's not bad but I did find myself preferring the first one. Despite the VGA graphics, the resolution isn't as sharp as the EGA style of the original, so there are puzzles that are hard to solve because of pixel-hunting reasons. The setting also isn't quite as atmospheric as the bayou estate the colonel had and I couldn't help thinking that the museum itself is more modern than a 1920s museum would have been (a talking dinosaur...? I dunno...). You also have to really pay attention to the details of the case because the game grills you on every victim at the end for killer and motive.




Call of Cthulhu: Prisoner of Ice. The sequel to Shadow of the Comet, but it's set around Antarctica in the late 1930s. You control a U.S. naval officer who is tagging along on a British ship that picks up a couple of odd crates excavated from the South Pole. Then tentacle monsters start appearing and stuff gets weird. Unlike the first one, the interface is a lot less clunky. In fact, it's stripped down so much that the game is a lot easier than the original because there's only so much you can do in any particular setting, so you'll muddle through relatively quickly. The only thing that tripped me up at first is that the game distinguishes between you using objects on yourself vs. other things, so don't forget to try clicking on yourself, too.

That combined with the character's fast walking speed makes the game go a lot faster. The graphics are quite nice - the characters have that pre-rendered sort of goofiness to them, but the backgrounds are really nice and there are some striking cutscenes thrown in occasionally. The story was interesting at first, but there's some especially loopy plotting and by the end I felt like the game had overreached itself a bit. Then the ending is so abrupt that I thought the game had crashed on me, so I rebooted and replayed it and, nope, that's how it was. The ending also gives you an A/B choice to make, but there's little difference as it turns out.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R Clear Sky

I can understand the grief this game is given since I had to install a mod as well as switch to DX9 in order for the game to remain stable. It has a lot of silly bugs that ruin the game experience, but fortunately for me the game worked pretty much fine until the very end where I had to rely on an exploit to beat the game (or waste another three hours I just don't have).

I just want to talk about the experience of playing the game more than any linear look at the game's start to finish since that's also the best way to play it. I mean, yes you need to progress the story to open the world up more but for the most part you can take the game at your own pace. It's an interesting companion game to Far Cry 2 and Cysis Warhead, both of which were also released in 2008. That year followed up a true landmark year in gaming that I can say in all honestly has not been surpassed yet as we still live in the shadow of Assassin's Creed, Modern Warfare, the tech Crysis pushed, and the fact that that was probably the last year that a slate of RTSs came out. Also released that year was the Witcher for PC which on this site should need no introduction for its importance.

Anyway, what I am saying is that those three games had some pretty tough acts to follow and I was hoping to play FC2 and Clear Sky in tandem to the point where I could beat them at the same time but while FC2 is good and all I am growing tired of it faster than I did Clear Sky and felt the motivation to beat Clear Sky much more so.

Clear Sky among its brothers in the STALKER games has my favorite graphics, gun fights, and gun play. The visuals are the best in the series in ways that are easy to see but difficult to describe. The way that the lighting, sky boxes, and effects such as anomalies, tracers, and explosions can play on your screen is something that had me marveling every here and again. I put up with the slightly different muscle memory of screenshots in this game from my usual with Afterburner (I cannot get Afterburner to work with any STALKER but CoP) just to capture some of the moments when they did occur.

The firefights are my favorite in this game since you get to work with groups of other STALKERs more in this game than you do in the other games in the series. They do feel pretty good and the AI often times is impressive and makes for fantastic scenes where dudes are flanking, covering, and advancing. Likewise, the AI will often times just shoot at a spot on the wall for five minutes, push you out of cover, and get itself killed. Unfortunately, as with everything in the series especially, nothing is perfect and often times this shows in some ugly ways. That said, these actions with your buddies clearing outposts together still live vividly in my mind more so than similar ones in the other two games in this series (certainly better than the poorly handled sequences in FC2).

The guns are harder to describe why they feel good to me here more than the other two games in the series but they just do. They do, however, seem more prone to jamming than previously or in the following game (once more, certainly no as bad as FC2 even when you purchase the guns).

The one thing I felt just was not as good in this game as the other two in the series was the quests/artifact hunting. CoP has that beat easily, and SoC has a better, more clearly defined story. Clear Sky is at its best when you are engrossing yourself in the zone as a conflict area where you interact with the factions instead of individuals in the factions. This is just me rambling, getting my thoughts down for my own future reference probably. Anyway, it is probably the slightly weakest game in the series (I only put it on a computer I recently got so that in the event of something catastrophic happening like my first time trying this game nothing much would be lost) but it is very much worth grabbing and making work if you enjoy the other two games, just note that I phrased that previous statement very deliberately. This one is the one you play when you want more STALKER, I would recommend playing the other two more so if you just want good games.

Trombone Champ

A musical rhythm game fit even for unmusical people without a sense of rhythm, because it's basically just a joke, extremely lenient and flattering in its score system and the "trombone" music will sound kind of terrible even if you do everything very well.

You play with the mouse, just moving it up and down and clicking at the right times to hit the notes, and you unlock silly stuff just by playing, no need to be good (altthough it will probably speed things up a little). The unlocks were all rather lame and useless but I guess that was the point. I'm told it's hilarious to watch, so I think it's funnier if you share the experience with others. As a player I had difficulties playing the game AND savoring the graphics and effects on screen at the same time (kind of how QTEs often distract from what's going on because you're so focused on just pressing the right buttons). And I really sucked at the game. I could get top scores in some of the slower songs that I'm more familiar with (like national anthems), but most of the others were way too fast and chaotic for me, and I also realized that even though I had heard most songs in the game's repertoire before, I didn't really know them all that well.

Also, if you want to actually beat the game, you have to look at it like an adventure game. Although there are clues in the game on how to become the Trombone Champ, I probably wouldn't have figured out the major part of it without a guide, because I wasn't even prepared for the solution to be this obscure. All in all, it was fun for a while because of how unexpected and goofy it was, and because a friend had a hoot watching me play, but it did get a bit old after a while (also because I didn't really see much improvement on my part; no idea if it's just me, but I thought the difficulty spike between the few songs that were accessible to me and all the rest was huge - maybe part of that was intentional, too, but it made it less interesting to play for me, after having a short chuckle about the absurdity of it all).

Reminds me of this Onion article:
https://theonion.com/activision-reports-sluggish-sales-for-sousaphone-hero-1819569239/

Valfaris Mecha Therion and En Garde!

Both very short but very fun games, the first (departing from the previous title formula) a heavy metal shoot 'em up and the second a fast paced action game focusing on environment manipulation and dueling.
In both you can significantly extend the play time by taking on challenges, replaying the game with added difficulty or performing specific feats and searchign for secrets.

I almost bit on Mecha Therion this past weekend, but I went with The Excavation of Hob's Barrow instead. I'll probably get it next time around.

The Excavation of Hob's Barrow. It's a pretty good adventure game with an Arthur Machen/HP Lovecraft/British folk horror vibe. You're controlling a woman who was inspired to become an excavator of barrows by her father, who became a vegetable after a "horse-riding accident" while he was off on a barrow-excavating job. You're called to a small town to look into a particularly odd barrow, but once you arrive the guy who invited you to come doesn't show up and the townspeople are mostly weird and evasive about whether the barrow exists at all.

The graphics are decent by standards of these Wadjet Eye games, and the use of cinematic closeups is a welcome feature. Those along with the music do contribute to the game being quite creepy when it wants to be. The puzzles are generally not too difficult and avoid moon logic in the way that modern adventure games do. There is a point, in the second of the three days of the game's timeline, where it felt like it was getting a bit wearisome with all the fetch quest puzzles. Like you'd have a particular goal to settle, so you find someone who will help in exchange for something but first they need something, so you find someone else who can give you that but they need something, so you find someone else...it's like it turns into the puzzle equivalent of those matryoshka dolls.

The game is fully voiced and the performances are pretty good but I did find that the writing tends to go on a bit. Assuming you don't just start speed-reading and skipping through lines, the voice acting alone probably extends the game's length by at least a couple of hours. If I was editing the game, I'd probably have started chopping the script down to mostly essential text just to move things along a bit more quickly.

The other issue with the storytelling is with the ending. Not to spoil things, but there's a point where the character gets information that would seem to strongly encourage her to do a certain thing, the player certainly knows the wisest course of action, but the character insists on not heeding all this information. It's a common problem with video game writing, where there's a divergence between what you think as the player and what the character thinks, but you can't influence the character on what to do even though you're literally controlling them. Maybe some players are just so into it that they just react to whatever the character does, but whenever this happens to me I emotionally disengage from the story immediately, so the impact of whatever the developers were going for with the ending ends up just being funny to me if I have any strong reaction at all.

I remember really enjoying this when I played it a few years ago. I think a lot of puzzle games lose me at the end because the mechanics and interactions get so complicated I can't visualize what will happen anymore.

Heart of China. One of the old Dynamix adventures. After the cyberpunk Rise of the Dragon, they did this as a sort of adventure serial homage. You control a rogue-ish pilot in the 1930s who's hired to rescue a rich businessman's daughter after she's kidnapped by a Chinese warlord. Early on you get a sidekick, Chi, who's a Chinese "ninja" (?!). The writing can be funny at times, but there's also a lot of stuff that falls flat. It's about on par with a really mediocre B-movie, closer to those Allan Quatermain movies with Sharon Stone than Indiana Jones.

You see things from a first-person perspective and there's a lot made of the game having branching paths, multiple endings, character-switching, and impactful dialogue. In practice, it's usually pretty clear, at least in action, what you should be doing to get through the game since most of the "branches" result in you just getting killed and having to restore. The dialogue is a bit murkier as the hero's options are almost always some variation of Bruce Campbell-like asshole-ism and it's often unclear what's going to set someone off or get them to help you. It's a bit more trial-and-error in those cases.

Like a lot of games, it feels a bit front-loaded, with the game probably peaking at the rescue sequence after you first fly the plane out of Hong Kong. You have multiple options for infiltrating the castle, you do some scouting to see how things are laid out, and then you work out how you're going to get the girl and escape. After this, the later scenes feel more scraped together, like the developers had used up their best ideas and just wanted to get to the end swiftly. Perhaps the budget started running low. The next section in which you're stuck in Kathmandu falls on the bad side of cartoony, and then the Istanbul and Orient Express sections just feel a bit threadbare - a reversal of the castle rescue from the second act turns out disappointingly simple in comparison as you basically just have to get through a window.

There are two arcade sequences. One is a really stripped down 3D tank simulator (Dynamix knew this stuff) that's tolerable aside from having trouble navigating the environment - a map would have been helpful to know where you could drive. The other is a swordfight on top of a speeding train that drove me crazy with its laggy controls. Fortunately, the game offers a "skip to win" option, which I did use for the swordfight.