Dink Smallwood HD is short, teen, linear and funny RPG. It took me 7 hours, but it should be possible beat final boss in half time. Best is, that game ends before it starts to be boring, so I can recommend it. At the beginning teen jokes are lame, but later I liked them. Game rewards players who looks for hidden secrets.

Infernax (XSX Game Pass)

Really hard retro 8-bit style platformer that is obviously inspired primarily by Castlevania 2 Simons Quest. It's an exceptional example of the style. I played it through twice to get both of the good endings, plus one of the joke endings- which takes about 30 seconds, basically you get off the boat, see the first monster and run back to the boat and get the hell out of dodge (yes you do get the end credits because it is an ending).

Like Simons quest the game has side quests and an open sort of overworld map where you have to clear at least 5 dungeons for the basic story. Just like Metroid you need to get abilities to unlock some areas. You also gain XP and gold to level and buy better equipment.

It is difficult, though not so much the combat, not even the bosses are all that hard once you see their telegraphed attack patterns. However, the platforming soon becomes brutal- well for me it does, I'm not the best at platformers by a long shot though. Despite the platforming being so hard, I just had to stick with it because the game is so awesome. Eventually I got past even the toughest segments in the final couple of dungeons. The ultimate good ending requires you to complete all the good side quests and complete an extra-long final dungeon. There are also evil paths which I haven't done- but I may return for later.

There are two difficulty levels, classic mode is like a NES 8-bit game. Casual mode gives a mid-dungeon save point and an extra life or two, this makes it more like a modern action/adventure platformer- though that platforming difficulty doesn't get easier, and for most people that will be the make-or-break aspect.

A single playthrough takes about 8 hours. Plus, you unlock codes for some endings that allow you to play as different characters- so after I did the ultimate good ending first, I replayed the regular ending as a mage. If all of that still isn't enough there is even a secret code to totally transform the game into a run and gun shooter like Contra. This is one of the best retro genre revival games of recent years.

Jazz Jackrabbit 2: The Christmas Chronicles - 2/5

Well, as it turns out, I did play The Christmas Chronicles in December. And, um, yep...it sure is three extra levels for Jazz Jackrabbit 2 with some slight Christmas theming...

The Little Acre

I didn't like it all that much. It's extremely short, more like a mini-adventure, and I completed it in one evening, yet it still felt like it overstayed its welcome and I was relieved when it was over. The drawn backgrounds are very nice, the music is pleasant, and some character design and animations are fun, too. But the gameplay wasn't, to me.

The pointing and clicking is simplified: you have a few hotspots that light up when the mouse pointer gets close and when you click on them (left mouse button only) the character either comments on something or does something with it. There are only ever a few rooms with a few hotspots at a time, and even though your inventory has over 6 slots, I don't remember ever having more than 3 or 4 items at a time, often only 2 (possibly not more than 10 or so items total in the whole game, and mostly very mundane ones, too). You can't combine any, just use them with hotspots, and this doesn't even work sometimes. Even though the puzzles are all easy (despite not always being logical), I had to look into a walkthrough twice, only to find out each time, that I had already done exactly what the game expected me to do, but the game had not properly registered I was doing it, even though the items had definitely been hovering over the right hotspot. It's either bugged or works only if you stand right next to the hotspot sometimes, I don't know, but it was very frustrating.

I also didn't really like the voiceovers. The girl's voice actress was still the best, even though it did not fit her character that well, but I could live with it. And apparently she was also animator, character designer and responsible for the concepts, so for a dev voicing her own game, it was nice enough, but the father was not to my liking, even kind of hard to understand sometimes, and the voice-acting did not help my impression that his character was somewhat bland. In the beginning I briefly considered shutting off voices and just reading the text imagining my own voices like back in the days. But all text just appears at the bottom of the screen in the same color, so that wasn't a very attractive alternative either.

Plus, the story felt a little too simplistic and also a bit weird in tone sometimes. I didn't think it was very satisfying, nor very captivating. All in all the game had a couple of nice concepts, graphics, animations and music, but didn't convince me in the sum of its parts.

EDIT: Forgot to mention another thing - there is only one save game slot and it's connected to autosaving, so if you miss part of a dialogue or cutscene due to some RL distraction, you can't just reload and watch it again, because the game will most likely override your only slot with an autosave afterwards. It happened to me once or twice and I had to rewatch the scenes on YouTube. Not a great design decision for a point and click adventure game.

High On Life (XSX Game Pass)

Apparently, this is from the creator of the Rick and Morty cartoons...which I've never seen. what it means though, is that this game has even more adult themes and vulgar language than the South Park games. It will absolutely offend some people big time, but I loved it. What other game lets you shoot a kid and celebrate the act with an achievement?
The story is that earth is invaded by an alien drug cartel that abducts humans as a living narcotic. So, you join up with a sentient species of talking guns to take down the head honchos of the syndicate.

The first-person shooting mechanics are definitely serviceable and the sentient guns each have some fun and useful secondary fire modes. However, it is the world design that really nails things. The main biomes are all fun and look great. Getting around the levels evolves as you get more guns with their special abilities.

There is plenty of world building that follows the rest of the games warped sense of humor. The TV in your house runs four full length b-grade horror movie classics- Vampire Hookers, Tammy and the T-Rex, Blood Harvest and Demon Wind...the devs probably had to pay like a few hundred dollars for those licenses!

I found that it ran perfectly and looks great. Clearly, there are a lot of "professional" reviewers out there that have taken it way too seriously and are giving it scores like 3 or 4 out of 10. But people that play it and know what they are getting into are giving it great scores. So, it's another one of those divisive games like Scorn from earlier in the year. I'm actually just thankful that some people still make divisive games. I may have to replay this one, I haven't worked out how to get the "spend 15 hours in an alien strip club" achievement.

I finished Atom rpg a few months ago. I had some fun with it, and still think it's an interesting take on the Fallout formula, but have to say my initially very favourable impression was dampened a bit the longer the game went on. There's some pretty bs design in it. Combat veers between unchallenging and boring and absurdly unfair, pretty flawed encounter design (though on the plus side you at least have rudimentary control over your companions, unlike in the old Fallout games, which removes a source of frustration). The dungeons (or rather bunkers) are also pretty painful, having to make your way through endless corridors, fighting endless swarms of trash enemies and looking through hundreds of containers just isn't very fun.
Quests often featured interesting characters, but I felt more could have done with some of them. There are hints of some larger plotlines with the regional politics between different factions and places, but it felt a bit under-developed in the end.
Anyway, it's still a game with quite a bit of charm and atmosphere and a respectable achievement for an inexperienced indie team, it's just that the gameplay and rpg mechanics could have been better.
Rating: 3/5.

The Walking Dead: The Final Season (XSX Game Pass)

Decent end to the Clementine story line. I thought the gameplay was a step back, in that there were far too many instant death decisions. I guess people must have complained that decisions didn't have enough consequences and that was their answer. I died 32 times in the story, almost twice as much as I died in Demon's Souls last month. So, there you have it, The Walking Dead: The Final Season is harder than a From Software game.

Welcome to Elk

I really enjoyed this collection of stories about a nondescript snowy island village partially based on RL memories of Greenland. It's more of a narrative multi-media experience, like an interactive comic book with more talking than walking, but it's also much more involving than your average visual novel since it's animated, diverse and including several easy but entertaining mini-games. Somewhat comparable to Night in the Woods maybe, but on a much smaller scale and without branching paths. You get up each day, walk to where the "action" is and then some scenes or dialogues take place between the main character and the villagers before you go to bed again. Occasionally, there is some meta content, too, but I don't want to spoil anything.

I thought the presentation was very nice. The music was particularly pleasant to me and a good fit for the quirky style. The graphics are somewhere between funny comic book and colorful children's drawings, not aiming for lifelike accuracy, which might not be to everyone's liking, but I quite liked them for their slightly odd, somewhat charming simplicity. The mix of gameplay elements and the variety of scenes, plus the briefness of it all (dialogues are short and to the point, presented in speech bubbles) also added to my enjoyment, and at 3-4 hours, played in shorter sessions over several days, the game did not overstay its welcome for me but was entertaining until the end.

As for the storytelling, I appreciated the rare setting, and that the stories were more realistic/real and down to earth, yet also rather crazy and less predictable than typical video game stories. Even though the game's atmosphere is pretty light-hearted all throughout, the stories got quite dark though and entered uncomfortable and gruesome territory more than once, involving sexual harrassment, killing, sudden deaths, and lots of 'casual' alcoholism. At the same time, it has a very pragmatic and sometimes creative approach at dealing with these topics, no preaching or depressive moods, more of a "that's life", "don't let it get you down" and "there can be beauty even in the tragic" kind of attitude. All that might turn out to be off-putting to some players, so you've been warned, but it also felt refreshing to me to be confronted with all that in more unexpected ways. It is not a horror game nor a game that makes you cry, just a generally upbeat game that also doesn't shy away from the ugly parts of life.

As a sidenote, what I criticized in my recent review of The Little Acre, the one slot autosaving, is present in Welcome to Elk as well. But here the problem is of a different kind: the game autosaves at very few occasions only, like the start of a day or after a minigame, so if you miss parts of a dialogue, you could just leave the game and it would not save, and then you would be able to (but you'd also have to) replay the whole day. Fortunately the days are very short and you can click quickly through dialogues, so you'd hardly ever lose more than 20-60 seconds of "progress", and since all of it is linear and not challenging, only text, you can just breeze through it to get where you left off. So while also not ideal for a purely narrative game, it didn't bother me as much. And there are three different slots for three different playthroughs at least, so starting a new game won't automatically erase your current one.

I finally finished Control Ultimate Edition! It took me about two weeks to beat the base game but almost two years to complete both Foundation and AWE DLCs. Though the reason is that I simply put away the game for a time, not because those DLCs were particularly difficlut.

Still, I liked the game, mostly for its story and cool lore based on urban legends, conspiracy theories and paranormal shenanigans. It reminded me of The Secret World quite a lot. Gameplay is also cool and dynamic. Even towards the end it becomes somewhat repetitive due to the lack of enemy variety.

DLCs are pretty much "more of the same". With a few interesting side-quests( main game has this too) and gameplay gimmicks, that honestly aren't that memorable.

Fuga: Melodies of Steel, Dec 17 (Xbox Game Pass)-I really liked this. It was a pretty challenging tactical, turn based, strategy/rgp. The plot was serviceable but I liked quite a few of the characters. I enjoyed a lot of the intermission activities like upgrading and developing relationships. The only activity I didn't like were the expeditions which felt really amateur. The little actions and cries of exclamation of the characters were fun. It was a little disappointing it wasn't voiced in English. The game was quite challenging up until the end. The final two bosses and all of chapter 12 were very easy. I'm not sure if it was because I finally started upgrading and cooking in earnest or if they really were supposed to be that easy. Still very fun though. I imagine this might be like a simplified Fire Emblem game. But I haven't played any so I'm not sure. I also constantly read the title as Memories of Steel for some reason.

Full List

Narita Boy. This is sort of like someone taking the basic idea of Tron but approaching it from a somewhat different angle. So instead of disc combat and lightcycles, the hero uses a sword with yellow, red, and blue elements in an action-platforming game. There's a lot of weird lingo but you get the gist of it well enough - there's a great evil trying to conquer the computer world and then shifting into the real world through a programmer's mind.

You run and jump. The jump is a bit floaty. You acquire fighting moves as you go through the game. There are a couple of set-pieces in which you have to ride a horse or a surfboard. It feels a bit influenced by stuff like Flashback or Another World in that it's very much about telling its story in a very stylish way but it stops short of cinematic platforming and sticks with a more traditional gameplay style. The combat comes down to figuring out enemies' weaknesses and then dealing with the game throwing increasing numbers of them at you in different mixes, so you have to switch your style while evading.

They really art-directed the crap out of it. It's one of those games where you could take a screenshot at any moment and it would look like something beautiful. For the most part the art style doesn't get in the way, although I did get stumped really early on for a bit because I didn't realize that you could climb a particular type of surface - it just looked like more background noise to me. Once I got over that, it was mostly smooth sailing the rest of the way. It's hard to replenish health sometimes, but the game fills you up if you get killed, so sometimes it's advisable to just let yourself die so you can respawn at full strength.

I wish the game gave you the option of replaying prior sections because there's a collectible aspect that's easy to miss in parts. It doesn't affect the end of the game - there's only one ending - but people who are into 100-percenting stuff might get irritated at having to completely replay it to pick up what they missed. And it ends on a cliffhanger, which is kind of lame. I had a nice time with it although I wouldn't call it a must-play.

Finished Nanotale: Typing Chronicles. A really good typing game, highly recommended if you liked Epistory. It takes the same gameplay but with some improvements (modifiers like fire, air, poison...), some light puzzles, a good artistic direction and an interesting story.

Full list here.

This year I finished 29 games. All for PC of course. The following:

25 to Life
Pariah
Penumbra: Overture
Penumbra 2: Black Plague [+ Requiem (expansion)]
Soma
Amnesia: A machine for pigs
Contract J.A.C.K.
Distraint: Deluxe Edition
Distraint 2
Dungeon Siege [+ Legends of Aranna (expansion)] [+ Return to Arhok (bonus pack)]
Dungeon Siege 2 [+ Broken World (expansion)]
Dungeon Siege 3 [+ Treasures of the Sun (expansion)]
Shellshock 2: Blood Trails
Drakensang: The Dark Eye
BlackSite: Area 51
Arx Fatalis
Secret Files (1): Tunguska
Secret Files 2: Puritas Cordis
Crusaders of Might and Magic
Secret Files 3
Secret Files: Sam Peters
Stories: The Path of Destinies
Broken Sword (1): The Shadow of the Templars (both original and Director’s Cut)
Broken Sword 2: The Smoking Mirror (both original and Remastered)
Broken Sword 2,5: The Return of the Templars
Broken Sword 3: The Sleeping Dragon
The Bard’s Tale (2004)

Licence to Chill - Evil Genius 2

This is a interesting case being players opinions can range from good to not good. I'm certainly the former and had a totally groovy time with this Bond-villain themed basebuilding game.

I selected the angry CIA lady with spider legs as my genius being I thought she was the most hilarious, and I chose the doughnut shaped island. My lair went through several renovations and optimizations over the course of the campaign. While some waiting mechanics may not be your cup of poisonous tea, I felt the core game mechanics of building, architectural & design challenges in your base balanced it out. I always had construction projects going on kept me occupied while sometimes waiting for tasks to complete. My top henchman was a hilarious murder robot called Iris. A lot of competition in the management/basebuilding genre and I believe it's my personal choice among them.

Time: 187hrs
Genius: Emma
Top Henchman: Iris
Island: Caine Key
DLCs Purchased: 3
Game Completed: 107

After beating Spacebase Startopia recently I really felt an urge to play another builder game but this time a good one. I chose Aven Colony which I've beaten now - specifically the PS4 version on PS5. Well, it's better but honestly still not good.

I was actually interested in this one ever since I first heard about it. A city builder about colonizing another planet with a story campaign and with pretty nice visuals and with music by Alexander Brandon to top it off - what's not to like?

So, the thing is that there's nothing particularly irritating about this game which is a massive step up from Spacebase Startopia. For starters, it's actually fully functional. There's none of that agent nonsense here that SimCity 2013 unleashed upon mankind. People have places where they live, they have places where they work, they consume food, they need electricity, clean air, entertainment and so on and it's really just statistics and zones, most of that stuff can be previewed and it works as it should.

The problem is that even though the game has a whole bunch of systems in place like air quality, crime, food variety and a dozen other things, it's actually utterly shallow and devoid of any challenge. Your main goal is really to keep up the happiness of your population so you stay in power - that's the most complicated part of the game because happiness is determined by a ton of factors but in practice it's laughably easy to maintain high happiness. Satisfy the base requirements by placing a few farms and water, avoid trouble like bad air quality and crime, again by placing the corresponding structures and... that's pretty much it.

There's kind of a day and night cycle where cyclically you don't get any solar power or farms don't produce any food but it's easy enough to get power from geothermal generators and farms brutally overproduce food anyway - just a 2-3 farms will still clog my warehouses in no time even when my population has grown to hundreds of people. There are dozens of different types of food and they grow in different areas but you will always find enough fertile soil to grow 2-3 types of food which is more than enough. Sometimes weird alieny things will float into your colony and unleash a plague or attach to your buildings but again: remember to keep building the corresponding structures so they cover your whole colony and that stuff is gone in no time. You never really face any time pressure or shortages of resources so you never have to compromise - you will have to wait a few seconds or a minute at worst until you can place that building you need.

Oh yeah, and there's a world map where you can send some aircraft around but it's really just a silly minigame that's even more simple than the fleet stuff in Assassin's Creed: Black Flag. Just send your aircraft from marker to marker and you get more of those resources that your warehouses are already overflowing from. Sometimes they will fail, so they go back to the colony, you lose 5-6 guys whom you replenish in a matter of seconds, and off they go again. You can also build auxiliary colonies on that world map which just means placing a marker and then you can trade with those guys and get resources that your colony lacks (which is virtually never a thing).

The game already appeared to be suspiciously banal on the first level but I figured "hey, that's just the first level!". Soon you get desert and ice maps and so on, so I figured that maybe there'd be some challenges there but no. The other characters actively warn you that things are going to be different and tough, because the climate does not support something, but that's bollocks. Everything works the same, sometimes you will just have to expand a bit more aggressively in order to reach iron deposits and fertile soil, in the final oh-so-tough mission I needed a mill on top of farms - and that one was already provided free of charge.

The missions are also set up grotesquely. You're never presented with the final objective of the mission when you start, almost every mission is this endless stream of trivial objectives like "now build two farms", "now export 500 melons" etc. until eventually you get an objective which triggers the end of the mission. I figured that by the end of the campaign things might get a bit more interesting and open-ended but... not really. In the final missions you do get some freedom and you get objectives like "build 150 buildings" (of any kind) which is just silly. A fully functional colony with all features needs like 80 or maybe 90 buildings and I really had to force myself to build those 150 buildings and started placing nonsense.

Finally, there's a story. Like in StarCraft you get these dialogues between a bunch of important characters taking part in this whole colonization project and a few of them were actually kinda fun. The story seemed promising for a minute but then it turned out to be the most generic and infantile plot you could think of and the ending made me cringe.

Now, I admit, I only played this game on normal difficulty, there are two harder difficulty levels, one of them being intimidatingly called "insane", and maybe the game gets a bit more interesting then but I would rather move on to a another builder that is a bit more engaging by default.

Now, I know I've taken a massive dump on the game here. I wish to emphasize that it's not a terrible game. If you're looking for a very casual city builder and just something to relax to it's actually an okay game. But if you're looking for anything resembling a challenge steer clear of this one.