log

short (and free!) narrative game about the human drive to explore and find meaning. the theme of the story was fairly heavy handed and straight forward, but i enjoyed the visual style of the game quite a bit. rock portion felt extremely inspired by EEAAO but maybe reading too into the author's inspirations here.

blew through this in a few days, can't remember the last time i played a shooter that's so breezy to pick up and mess around in. something neat about a shooter that doesn't really care if you're moving at 200mph, and keeps it challenging most of the way through

really good double barrel and rocket launcher in this game, carried me through most of the playthrough

an extremely pretty game about an artist i likely wouldn't have known anything about without playing this. not a hard recommend but certainly a game to check out if you'd be into this sort of thing. personally wish it was a bit longer but i get it based on how much art needed to be produced for this

i'd recommend turning off the pac-man skulls that chase you through a maze though, felt like they pretty significantly detracted from the experience.

probably the best pokemon adjacent game i've played. really liked the monster design, and it makes the 2s format fun by giving you quick options to win rather than making it a big slog to remove every member of the opposite team. great soundtrack too.

my only real systems criticism is that
* some of the effects are just minimal enough that they didn't seem like something i'd ever care to do in the game - applying tired with one of my limited move spots seemed worse than a field effect or something to help stall
* i'm sure i could look at my opponents stats but it was difficult to tell which attack type they'd be favoring or strong in at a glance

got to rituals and just felt like i could be doing anything else with my time.

this game does a good job of always having something for you to progress on, but it happens in such a way that you can just tab through every menu and click all the upgrades, then loop back and do it all over again. because of this, before i gave up my spell bar was just 8 copies of fireball for powering through rituals since the other spells didn't seem like they mattered that much when everything kinda just leveled itself.

also i don't mind the sort of "discovery" aspects of the game, but i got stuck not realizing that void moss had a different branch at some point that unlocks a mandatory plant, but the game doesn't do a great job of indicating that.

Not normally a VN guy, but started this randomly the other evening and woke up early to finish it out. I enjoyed the central loop of the game quite a bit, and I appreciate that it's good about not letting you repeat paths on accident. Thought the ending I picked was quite satisfying as well, even if it leaves everything on an (appropriate) non-conclusion.

short exploration game; funny and interesting. really think that it's worth checking out for the low price of $0, especially since you'll be able to tell if you're into the tone of the game within 5 minutes of starting. and it's extremely well animated? crazy level of craft in this one.

shout out to the shaman and dratula

i'm still a sucker for a good walking sim at the end of the day, especially one rooted in walking around source engine maps.

the end of the tower hits like a truck, even if its foreshadowed heavily. i could do without the epilogue, but still thoroughly enjoyed my time with this.

its hard not to think of the narrator's point of view on consuming media and criticizing it for validation. obviously most people never go this far, but as someone with no artistic talents, how often have i used "taste" as a way to seek external validation?

I'm still playing this, but for practical purposes of calling it finished I'm just counting it as completing the storyline quests.

This game is kind of all over the place, 50% of the story is at the very least interesting if rushed, and 50% had me back to not even reading the quest logs - the Haranir quests in particular felt so perfunctory that I couldn't wait to be done with them. The quests also do not trust the player to have an attention span longer than 3 seconds - any "cutscene" quest will have a button that's like "I don't have time for story!" and by the end of the xpac I felt like it was back to the default setup of 3 quests: get some items, kill some guys, kill named guy. The emo elf therapy speedrun was probably the highlight just because it was the only questline that didn't feel like it was made for someone watching Youtube shorts in a second monitor.

I did most questing as a ret paladin, which feels good when all your buttons line up but there simply aren't that many buttons and so its a very samey gameplay experience for all 10 levels.

I kinda dig the healing though? Enough to make an alt? Reading online healer design seems to be a bit of a mixed bag in the community's eyes, but coming from XIV it's kind of fun to have a toolkit and stuff to do in combat besides hit damage spell at the occasional oGCD.

The theme park stuff is whatever to me, but I will give Blizzard props for actually making a world that you do stuff in rather than SE's "zones that act as cutscene backdrop."

Felt like a bit of a filler patch - the dungeon and trial were nothing to write home about but still enjoyable - but between the central plot question and whatever the hell they're doing with evolved mode I'm excited for Evercold.

Nice change of pace after the slog that was Shadowlands - quests aren't all cookie cutter, some of the plot stuff (blue dragonflight reunion for example) was actually interesting, and they made zones that are actually fun to fly around.

This is rough; I can see why XIV was eating WoW's lunch at this time. Can't really comment on the combat systems since they're not reflective of how the game played back then, but everything else is really tedious.

The four factions are mostly paint by the number, with the weird warlike faction being the only one that's somewhat endearing. The quests all feel like the same grouping of three - collect some items, kill some small mobs, kill one large mob - which gets tedious when you're doing it dozens of times just to have an NPC you've never met tell you that there's not enough anima. The map makes flight paths feel worthless as well, since it's 4 islands that you need to travel between with the hub area that's way, way too large and doesn't allow mounts.

I also really didn't like the Maw at all, nor was the roguelike tower place very fun either. Overall, glad to be done with this, won't be picking this to level through again since expansions before and after are so much better.

Fun to solve most of these, the majority are fairly straightforward, a couple are pretty interesting, and one is unfortunately the sliding piece maze.

I'm sure this will be a bit of a controversial game; it wears it's inspiration so clearly on it's sleeve that it's impossible to not compare it to Disco Elysium.

In spite of that, or maybe because of it, I flew through this game - it's tightly designed and interesting enough that I really wanted to see what was happening in each day. I really enjoyed the places where it differed as well, spellcasting and combat in particular.

And while I think it's hard to land something quite as good as the tribunal or the phasmid, I found the last act of this game to be satisfying, and tbh they got me with the last decision changing.

Two decades later and I'm surprised at how good the difficulty curve is, the last "speed up" of the final minigame set feels extremely do or die, and the collection setup rocks.

This is a neat little auto battler, with some interesting ideas about how factions and abilities should work. I got fairly far into Chaos before I called it good - I would say that the game feels extremely easy; I don't think I lost a single round.

This is a funny concept that drags out maybe a bit too long? Maybe that's the point?

There's a fun optimization puzzle hidden in here that I wish I had to tinker with a bit more often than I felt I had to; by the end I was just starting games and then doing chores to grind out the last few ranks. I also was kind of just not reading the emails by the end of the game.

hard game to review - i think at a glance you can tell if you're going to be into an extremely indie walking simulator where it feels like the dev is learning unity as the games progress

somehow both tense and funny in equal measure - the rare game i take screenshots of dialogue that i found funny. the developer has a great sense of what makes an empty room tense, as every episode seems to have moments where it feels like things could fall apart at any time.

really enjoyed the last two episodes, but Eyes of the Killer is where I just ended up playing through the game as rapidly as possible, as the protagonist is drafted into a nonsensical version of sleep no more

delightful little game. i don't know how they got away with making me go "ohh" when they teach you some new way to move the bombs around or traverse the area, with the last mechanic being a legit "how did i never do that on accident even" moment

Feel like I've got everything I want out of this game after putting about 32 hours into it (ironically the same amount of time I put into Hades 1).

I really enjoyed the act of playing this game at the start - they drip feed new weapons and mechanics at a good clip, and figuring out each boss fight is just as enjoyable as it was in Hades 1. As I got deeper into the game though, I sort of lost momentum - I was skipping through dialogue and didn't feel like the story was grabbing me in the same way the first was. The zone three in both paths also felt like a slog, and the runs were just slightly too long for me. Looking at what would essentially be doing another 10 hours of "solved" content felt like a slog just to close it out.

I did really like playing this, but I think I got everything I wanted to out of it before closing the plot out.