Chook and Sosig: Walk the Plank

A short point and click where you play a cat, whose playing some kind of d&d'esque roleplaying game where he plays a pirate searching for treasure. While the visuals are cute and the characters are good, there is a lot of backtracking, the puzzles aren't that challenging and the story is kind of jagged due to it constantly cutting between the room where their playing the board game and the pirate adventure. It could be argued the game is overpriced, I got it for £3.59 in the sale and was kind of disappointed it 1 ½ hours to finish.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution DC

IT's a lot better than Invisible War, fortunately. The idea of making a prequel as a sequel is good and mostly well done. Unfortunately this game has some minor and major design flaws that I cannot easily accept.

One ist the general art style of the game. I can somehow accept the slightly animeish look of the game (though I find it hard to have any sympathy for the protagonist), but the overall style is completly out of touch with the original game, despite playing a lot earlier than the original everything looks far more (and far too much) futuristic. Even for a 2012's vision of 2027 it is just completely overdone.

The hacking mini game is dull and redundant, there is simply no need to have a chance-based minigame for a skill-based action, except for stretching the game time. Worse than that it completely devaluates another game mechanic (looking for codes) because thanks to the absurd amount of money and xp that can be gathered this way no sane player will not invest heavily into the hacking skill right from the start.

I'm mostly fine with the level design but it is a bit monotonous, boxes, offices, cramped rooms everywhere. A few more outside areas for combat wouldn't have been to bad. I just dropped my sniping gun at some point because it is a rather useless weapon in this game and takes up much too much inventory space for the two or three times it might be useful. Unfortunately the last level is a disgrace and just dull and badly designed. As it is the last level it just leaves a sour taste that the game does not deserve.

I'm also disappointed that there is no h2h combat in this game, just animated scenes but at least gore. Are you kidding me?

It's not a bad game at all and most of the time I had fun playing it but with all the praise the game got I surely had higher expectations. 3.5*

Small update regarding Hollow Knight. After sinking additional 5-6 hours of fight I've reached and completed the last challenge. The game was absolutely fascinating experience. 95 hours and I'd spend next dozens of hours in this world if only possible.

If you don't know the game - go and get it. It really doesn't matter you don't like the genre or you're bad in metroidvania. I'm terrible in platformers, I usually play cRPG and point&clicks. This game is an ultimate challenge, it may even change your life. GIT GUD!

Resident Evil 5 DLCs:
- Lost in Nightmares: I liked revisiting the RE1 mansion in (full 3D) 3rd person.
- Desperate Escape: Nothing special, but perfectly fine. It's like a part cut out of the main game.
They're short, but still, really annoying that there are no save points!

Alien: Isolation - Nice relaxing game on hard. The second half dragged at times, but it wasn't as bad as some people claim.

Beneath a Steel Sky - There seems to be a divided opinion on whether it's a true classic or not, but I enjoyed it.

Papers, Please - This and Obra Dinn are some of the best indie games I've ever played. Whatever Lucas Pope makes next is a day one purchase.

Ys I+ - Fun game, but it's definitely a product of its time. Contender for worst final boss in history.

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth

I am not into Lovecraft, I got this game because it was a survival horror and it was made by Bethesda who also made the Prey remake, so I knew they could do the genre. DCotE see's you play as Jack Walters, a private detective sent to investigate a missing persons case in an old fishing town, and of course being Call of Cthulhu your basically roped into a world of cults, tentacles and insanity. The game starts more like a puzzle game, you explore the town, sneak into shops, gather clues. After this is one of the more memorable sections in the game, a bit where your chased through an old hotel by angry locals with guns, a chase that also requires you to barricade doors you run through to slow the enemies down, something I've never seen done in any other game. However the game slows down after this point, you don't get a gun until about 1/3 of the way through the game, meaning you have to rely on stealth, the stealth is not good, enemies patrol paths can become glitched, and sometimes you climb up a ladder to find 2 guards staring at you immediately, conversely if there are 2 guards next to each other but not looking at each other, you can shoot one in the head and the other guard won't notice.

Now onto the gameplay. The gameplay is rather... monotonous, you face mostly people with guns for the entirety of the game, a different enemy not appearing until the 3rd to last level. Stealth is pointless once you get a gun, because enemies can be killed in one headshot and rarely notice if someone dies next to them, it's much easier to just start blasting everything. The sanity effect is more annoying than anything, despite saying it causes visual and auditory hallucinations on the store page, it only really causes dizziness, lots and lots of dizziness, this dizziness is caused by looking at enemies, looking down while high up, seeing dead bodies or sometimes just for no reason, it also causes your character to slow down, which makes platforming a nightmare. The game also likes its invisible walls, it makes traversing a pain as you know you have to drop down to the next floor, but you don't know where the developers wanted you to jump down, some invisible walls won't go down unless you kill all the enemies in the area (There is no indication that you must do this). There are also some areas that cause you to instantly get shot to death, even if there is no one with a gun there.

This game is buggy as hell, even with the fan made patch. A general example is if an enemy leans, shooting their head will count as a miss, but shooting where their head would be if they weren't leaning counts as a headshot. It's easy to get stuck in walls, the final chase scene has a time limit based on the power of your CPU, not clearing out rooms of enemies sometimes causes levers to not activate, clearing out rooms of enemies sometimes causes levers to not activate (I didn't repeat myself, both happened to me) and interacting with object sometimes doesn't work unless your standing and looking in a very specific place. The glitches make the game frustrating, but the gameplay turns it into a slog where you run around fighting the same enemies to try find the specific item you need to pass.

The story is... it's good, but it doesn't make sense, and that's before the eldritch horrors appear. The main character's sanity varies wildly, it's not a gradually going insane, he is insane near the start, stops being insane, becomes insane again, is hired by the FBI and suddenly becomes sane again and despite all he see's, manages to stay sane, right until the end. The ending itself doesn't make sense unless you know Lovecraft lore, and even then, involves telling a character to do something, wiping their memory so they don't remember being told to do said thing and then expecting them to do it anyway. Maybe it's because I'm not a fan of the genre, or because of the hour I spent angrily trying to put a gem in a pedestal, but I think this may be the worst survival horror I've ever played.

Headfirst Productions

Arkane Studios
- And it's not a remake.

Just beat Call of Duty: WWII on PS4 which I just got from PS Plus. It's okay.

On one hand it was cool to play a new "classic" war shooter set in WWII. The modern presentation allowed me to re-experience a bit of that thrill from back when I played Medal of Honor: Allied Assault or the original Call of Duty for the first time. And what can I say: beach landings and running through forests and shooting Nazis in the face is still fun and all in all I enjoyed it. It looks and sounds great and the gunplay is most of the time fantastic (although some guns are utterly under-powered for no good reason, like the BAR and Bren LMGs).

That said: I'm also a bit shocked by how little has changed in such a long time. You can spam smoke grenades, you have squad members who can throw you some ammo or medkits and healing makes you briefly vulnerable. It's nothing I haven't seen in other war shooters more than fifteen years ago. Other than that it's Call of Duty 2 with less diverse locations and a lot more melodrama. And besides the beach landing and one particular stealth mission I'll probably not remember anything about the game in a few months. I guess they tried to make it more "authentic" by letting us follow an actual character rather than let us skip around several faceless soldiers but all that did is get rid of memorable set pieces, something the war shooters of old used to have aplenty. And any authenticity they could have gained was killed by ridiculous over-the-top moments and the obligatory constant "knocked out by a scripted explosion for drama" events anyway. Even the last mission was frankly utterly underwhelming. And the scenarios may have been a bit more plausible than in many old war shooters but I feel that all in all the level design was pretty basic and unoriginal.

Ultimately it's a brief but enjoyable ride. Definitely not at all worth full price if you're not going to play multiplayer or the "Nazi zombies" mode but worth getting in a promo if you just want another WW2 shooter in the vein of the first three CoD games.

Mafia

It was time to revisit another classic. I still enjoyed it very much because the game itself it fantastic, although it has it fair share of problems today (controls - general controls could use a few qol improvements, melee combat probably a complete rework; the ai (especially companion ai) sometimes behaves terrible; a little bit more music wouldn't be too bad and of course, graphics and presentation aren't that impressive today anymore). I can see how much a proper remake could do to this game and I hope they stay close to the original game and don't fuck it up. 4*

Did you play the default GOG version which I hear has most of the original music removed, or did you use a patch to restore it?

I used the patch. But you have like 1 song/district and with all the time you spend in a car some songs just play a little bit too often.

I see. Thanks for the explanation!

...
(edited)

I played Mafia 1 and 2, wanted to play 3 but I hate how bad it is so I could not finish it.

My completed games in May:

Yakuza Kiwami
Loved that game and enjoyed every minute with it (played about 60 hours). The street fights with Majima got a little repetitive in the end, but at that point I already spent most of the time with the many mini-games and substories inside the game.
Story and characters were pretty good, in the end I only felt a little sorry for little Haruka. With all the stuff she had to witness and that happened to her and her family, she will probably need a very good child psychologist for many, many years.

Monster Loves You!
Kind of a choose-your-own-adventure game. You start as a newborn monster and during growing up, you'll have to make various decisions that will influence your character and the outcome of your life. I've completed two playthroughs. The first time I was kind, honest and clever and in the end I united the realms of humans and monsters. In my second plythrough I was a traditional monster: wild, brave ferocious and blood-thirsty. In the end I died, because I ripped my own heart out of my chest (which probably wasn't the most clever thing to do).

Game is quite fun for an hour or two and reminds me of the old classic Alter Ego, just with a monster theme instead of living a human life.

Puzzle Chambers
Game has an amateurish look, but the puzzles are solid. Also the story starts very strong and interesting (reminded me a lot of the movie Cube). Unfortunately it fell apart during the game and in the end it didn't make much sense.

Super Meat Boy
Ten years after release this is still the gold standard for hardcore platform games. Brilliant level design, tight controls and an increasing difficulty that makes things challenging, but never feels unfair. You will die many, many, many times, but when you are willing to learn, you'll succeed in the end.

I've only completed the light world and maybe 50% of the dark world, so I still return to the game on a regular base to unlock more characters and complete the rest of the levels and the Warp Zones.

Little Nightmares
I wasn't impressed by the first chapter and thought it was quite boring and frustrating. But the game got better and better with each chapter and in the end I really liked it. The design and atmosphere is great and the game certainly had some of the creepiest and most disturbing scenes I've ever seen in a video game.

Looking forward to the sequel that should come out this year.

Complete list of finished games in 2020