This made me chuckle. Yep, it's a nice way to play games.

Shadowhand. I liked the earlier game these developers made, Regency Solitaire, and here they've got a follow-up that adds a few RPG elements like upgradeable stats and inventory, and a new story in which a young woman needs to adopt a swashbuckling persona named Shadowhand to find out why something shifty is going on around her estate. The story is kind of "eh" but the game is easygoing fun. I will continue to check out their games, especially for times when I want something a bit more relaxing to play.

Janosik. That free game about the Eastern Robin Hood guy. It's fine. Pretty standard game about running around and exploring places to free your guys from the dungeons and then fight the big bad guy. It's non-linear but I wouldn't say it's a full-on metroidvania. You can just double-back to levels if you missed something. There are only a couple of major power-ups and it's mostly reliant on mastering the fighting and jumping. Game is very short but fun for an afternoon or evening run through it.

New Super Mario Bros. At the time this came out, the idea of going back to 2D Mario adventures was somewhat surprising, but now everyone accepts that Nintendo just likes to alternate ambitious 3D installments with retro ones, and some people are even getting sick of the retro Mario stuff. This first DS game is fine, though. It's maybe not as challenging as the original 2D games - even when it starts getting hard, you've accumulated so many extra lives that you barely care - but it provides the same sense of fun with some amusing new power-ups like growing to giant-size or shrinking down extra far but getting flea-like jumping ability.

Include me, please.

Building list ....

playing
Outrun 2 and Outrun 2006 coast to coast : 50%
Toca 2 : just started
Blur : 90%
Command and Conquer Zero Hour 100% and on
Superhot 100% and on
ApeOut 10%
Noita 90% alternative endings
Flower 70%

....more to come


finished

My first time here, and see this thread as a good way to keep on tracking played games without Galaxy

Just Cause 4

I wasn't really planning on replaying it, but decided to install it in my current machine and see how the graphics would look running on something other than minimal, which were the options I used before. But I was caught off guard because EGS doesn't have Cloud saves for this game, so my previous run through it was lost.

So I started playing and was having fun, a few hours later, I had over half of the map conquered. So I kept going forward.

I don't really recall what I said about this game before, but I do know that it is the best in the series for me, even though it's stuck with a terribly optimized and unstable engine (even with the tips from PC Gaming Wiki, it would crash every now and then).

Oh, and it does look great when graphics options are not set to minimum. XD

On a final note on the main campaign, despite being fairly good overall, it kinda ends on a wimper. For a series that once had us surfing ICBMs, ending on a bunch of normal elite enemies in a room with a few helicopters outside the window was rather lame, even if the ending video was actually good.

I just found out that Two Worlds 2 has 500 save slots. So, I should start deleting...
500 saves in 54 h. With a simple calculation this gives 1 save every 6 and a half minutes. This isn't THAT often (or is it?). :/

LEGO Batman: The Videogame (2008) (Linux/Wine)

It looks this game is older than "Lego Harry Potter" and it lacks some improvements made later. This one may be often quite frustrating. A lot of bugs (we had to replay one of scenarios), glitches and terrible controls. I played with my little son and co-op mode is also worse than in other Lego games (camera issues or loosing control because of too big distance between Batman and Robin).

All in all it's not a bad game, we've finished it and had some fun, but it's rather a matter of our world-saving attitude than a game itself :D In case of "Harry Potter" we've completed the game once again in Free Play mode, to find all bonuses and access all places. In case of "Batman" – no, thank you, main story is more than enough! ;)

List of all games completed in 2025.

Gomo (2013) (Linux/Proton)

Simple and short point&click game. It takes a bit more than 1 hour to finish its main story (and most of it is caused by characters moving too slowly). It's made by Slovak studio, feels a bit like Amanita games. Interesting, crazy graphics and music, absurd story. Rather boring than funny, I'm afraid.

List of all games completed in 2025.

Include me

2025

1. Growbot
2. Milo and the Magpies

Ape Out. You control an ape who's breaking out of a lab, smashing through any guards in your way. You can either smack them into walls, making them pop like water balloons or grab them and throw them in a specific direction, also making them explode everywhere. It has a similar kind of frantic pace as Hotline Miami, although it looks and sounds quite different.

The placement of guards is random, so getting through the game is less about memorization and more about developing tactics on what to do when you find yourself facing a certain number of guards, or better yet knowing how to avoid getting into situations of being surrounded in the first place. Sometimes you're lucky and sometimes not. I quite enjoyed the game, although I prefer the earlier levels when you're in a building to the later ones that have you on a cargo ship or in a jungle war zone. Smashing guys against the wall or throwing them out the window of a high-rise never gets old, though.

Sir Whoopass: Immortal Death

I'm glad I got this as a freebie as it hardly feels like a full and finished game. And I don't necessarily mean the fact that it just ends on a "To be continued" after a few hours. The game trolls the player on occasion and this could very well be one of those occasions. The bad thing is that you can't even tell. Sir Whoopass is so good at imitating the mediocre games it tries to make fun of that it just becomes another one of them itself. And that's always a great risk with parodies, especially the ones with "on the nose" humor as this one.

My main gripe with it isn't the humor though (despite it not being particularly clever or funny most of the times) - it's that Sir Whoopass starts out presenting itself as a parody game full of gags only to stop and run out of ideas after the first 1-2 hours. The premise of a parody RPG already isn't very original and exciting, but it should provide lots of opportunities for jokes, and yet most of them are only presented on the loading screens later in the game. There's a tutorial level, a Red Riding Hood parody level, a Stephen King's It parody level, and ... that's about all I can remember. After that, it does what every bad open world action/"RPG" game does and repeats the same patterns over and over, sending you on lots of same-y dungeon crawl missions to find the three doodads. There is no story to any of these dungeon crawls anymore and I didn't even bother to read and memorize their random names. The environment in the dungeon varies a little bit, some have puzzles or a new opponent or boss battle, so they aren't completely boring, but not all that creative either and it feels kind of repetitive after a while. And the game does not even comment on any of it anymore. One has a puzzle with lots of backtracking through a maze which is not fun at all, but is that a parody of bad game design or just bad game design itself? After being very blunt in the beginning and spelling everything out, here the game just stays silent about it. So it seems they really just ran out of steam and/or money. Which also shows when the narrator comments start repeating themselves, very soon.

And there is enough bad game design here to think that it wasn't all intentional. Was Sir Whoopass made for gamepad or keyboard and mouse controls? Both feel awkward in some way or other. There is a console-y feel to the game and button prompts, yet even with a gamepad plugged in you have to move the mouse cursor with the stick in menus instead of just selecting option with directions and shoulder buttons, as in your regular gamepad-friendly game. And why do you have to go through the same animations and dialogues again and again, in order to buy more than one weapon? Especially considering that you WILL want to buy all three different weapons available, every time you visit the "Blackschmidt", because item progression is very guided; there isn't much of an RPG here, really. Every few levels you gain access to new weapons which are always of the same three types, fast sword, heavy hammer, magical missile staff and mainly change in look and damage dealt, but it's more of an upgrade than a new weapon most of the times and you will hardly ever want to switch back to previously bought ones. In the world and the dungeons you can find chests that grant automatical upgrades to your current weapons (+25 or +50% damage), but it hardly matters as you will soon buy new weapons anyway and then these upgrades will become obsolete.

You can also find a lot of hats, which come with minor benefits like +10% damage to all weapons or x % fire protection etc., most of which doesn't really matter much either. If you're like me, in the end you'll just want to use that one head that automatically replenishes your staff ammo, because THAT does make a huge difference for a change. Or you'll just wear whatever you think looks funny. If I didn't overlook anything, there's also ONE "Pimp my protagonist" shop that sells about 6 different (mostly meaning differently colored) outfits and that's it, for the whole game, which is pretty poor. Worst of all though are the three doodads you have to find. One is a hat that automatically equips itself on certain conditions and never switches back to your hat of choice when the conditions are removed again. So this game that's all about collecting and wearing your funny hats of choice suddenly forces a hat on you again and again and makes you re-equip your own choice manually. The second item you get is never properly explained which can lead to players getting stuck without a walkthrough. And the third one doesn't appear to do anything, from what I've seen.

Last but not least, there are some repetitive mini-games in the world that are just as primitive and annoying as mini-games in AAA games, and Sir Whoopass doesn't comment on this either.

So Sir Whoopass not only fails at consistently poking fun at bad game design, it also kind of fails at being a well-designed game itself. It's like they wanted to make an open world action game but lacked the time, funds and creativity for going all the way, so they dressed it up as parody and then became bored with the concept themselves pretty quickly. They ridiculed a few fantasy tropes - and righfully so - but at the same time proved that a cliched story is still better than none at all, apparently.

That being said, it's not all bad, otherwise I wouldn't have finished it, despite it being comparatively short for an open world game. Occasionally I was caught by surprise and successfully trolled, and those were the most funny moments. The combat takes a bit time getting used to at first, but I came to enjoy it, especially since you're pretty overpowered most of the time, and opponents explode with much effect and pretty colors and sounds! I loved that enemies can actually turn on each other. Get a rifleman to deal friendly fire to a colleague and suddenly they will duel it out amongst themselves. Fun! I also liked the jetpack, and you get a vehicle for faster movement as well, even though its usefulness is limited since specific areas of the map prevent you from using it (without giving a good reason). The save system was very convenient, automatically saving after every combat encounter or other achievement, and into several slots. You can die pretty quickly but you never really lose significant progress and you can jump right back into it and try again. I didn't even bother much with manual saving due to that, although that's also an option. If they had actually aimed at creating a real open world RPG with interesting story and side quests and rewards that are worth it, or at least stuck to the parody idea the whole time and offered more content in this regard, this would have been a very solid base, IMO.

But as it is, it's more of a one trick pony and quickly forgotten again, the gaming equivalent of fast food, I guess. Which is a pity.

Little Kitty, Big City

Loved it! I was hesitant to buy it myself, because I was doubtful the comparatively high price would be justfied, but after getting it as Christmas present form a friend, I have to concede that it's very much worth paying for. It is short, but in a good and satisfying way, still kept me busy and happy for a couple of hours, just like the other games in its vein (think A Short Hike, Untitled Goose Game, The Spirit and the Mouse - if you liked any of these, you'll most certainly enjoy this one, too). And while it can seem a little rough around the edges, with slight clipping issues and occasional "what just happened?" moments, the beautiful graphics, cute and lively animations and relaxing amosphere more than make up for it. Just watching your kitty move about is pure delight, even more so when you start doing mischievous things like smashing pots, tripping people, stealing fish, catching birds (and letting them get away again). You roam around a small but very detailed open world that's shaped after a small Japanese town, with some stores you can enter, walls, crates and roofs you can climb, in search for cosmetic collectibles, side quests, opportunities for hijinks and hidden achievements. The dialogues (in the form of speech bubbles) were also well-written and funny and presented a range of memorable characters. It might not sound like much, but it was so much fun, precisely the type of game I enjoy.

Icewind Dale II (GOG)

I started this about 4 years ago, maybe more, but it couldn't be more than 6 years ago. I got so bored near the end of chapter 3, that I put it aside. I noticed that it was still installed, and the saves were still there- so I decided to finish it.

The final battle is horse shit, but I got through on the third attempt...with one character disintegrated and another dead. My party was Fighter, Barbarian, 2 Clerics, Thief and Sorcerer- all single class.

It's the worst of the Infinity Engine games. You can tell that Interplay were on the ropes and the game was just filled with quick linear sections as filler and the encounter design is mostly just spawn a shitload of enemies from nowhere and have them simply bum rush your party- allowing very little in the way of tactics. I think you can even tell that chapters 1 and 6 were probably the first parts completed and then the remainder was rushed. Chapter 4 could be used by a religious cult as a form of self-flagellation- I almost quit the game a second time near the end of chapter 4.

Overall, it does have some good sections. But I don't think I'll be playing this one a third time- the first time I finished it right after launch...now I know why I couldn't remember much of it. I'm also mystified why they took what was an almost perfect UI with the earlier Infinity games...and completely butchered it for this game. Anyway, I used the GOG version with the widescreen and resolution mods. Apparently, they are soon to release an enhanced version after all- built by reconstruction of the code, since the source is lost- I barely think it's worth the effort.

My Sexy Neighbor (Steam)

This was fun for a few hours, though the ending was predictable. I suppose it's like Hello Neighbor, except that you play as the bad guy stalking the woman that moved in across the street. There's also a free prologue or demo, which is basically the first few days of the full game.

Include me

Late to the party - wonder if I'll actually finish anything this year?

Bramble the Mountain King

If they ever sell it here on GOG, I'll be more than happy to eventually buy it. Although 3D, Bramble has the same gameplay pattern and often similar vibes as Inside or Limbo, with a small child exploring a scary world with simple controls and just the right amount of difficulty. Norse folklore is the core premise with heavy inspiration from Grimm fairytales; gnomes wear uniform pointy red hats several times taller than themselves and trolls with their gigantic noses prowl with malicious intent. I often find content disclaimers more distasteful than the content they warn about, but this was a good use of it. Boss characters make a habit of chopping Olle the 7-year-old protagonist in half, crushing his head, or just pulling him under a fluid surface for an otherwise unspecified demise. Poor Olle witnesses a Satanic murder-suicide, zombie infestation, the Grim Reaper wielding a dirt-rake, and he even slays an evil forest nymph. It's all worth it though, as long as he rescues his older sister from the belly of the Mountain King.