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1. Metroid Dread 2. Death's Door 3. Rusty Lake series 4. Gorogoa 5. Celeste 6. We Were Here 7. Yoku's Island Express 8. Portal 2 Co-op Campaign 9. Elden Ring 10. Stacklands 11. Loom 12. A Plague Tale: Innocence 13. Neon White 14. AI: The Somnium Files 15: Zero Time Dilemma 16. God of War 17. Monster Hunter World: Iceborne 18. Cult of the Lamb 19. Journey 20. Citizen Sleeper 21. Prey: Mooncrash 22. The Past Within 23. The Case of the Golden Idol 24. CrossCode 25. Jedi: Fallen Order 26. Haiku the Robot Aston fucked around with this message at 15:39 on Dec 31, 2022 |
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Jan 1, 2022 14:00
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 00:53 |
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2. Death's Door (normal ending) A game a day so far for 2022, although I don't think I'll be able to keep it up. This was pretty good, it's an isometric Zelda-like where you're a crow working as a reaper of souls. It's got the same kind of "Cute Souls" aesthetic as Hollow Knight. The combat is mostly fun, the puzzles work for me, and I only have a couple minor gripes.
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Jan 2, 2022 21:16
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3. Rusty Lake series I didn't want to post these all separately since they're only about an hour long each. Escape room puzzles with some incomprehensible lore layered over top, they're weird but I liked them.
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Jan 3, 2022 18:33
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4. Gorogoa. I agree with what the others have said, it's a cool short puzzle game with nice graphics and a clever idea.
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Jan 9, 2022 23:03
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and 5. Celeste (All A, B, and C Sides but I'm going to leave Farewell for now). This was my second playthrough, and I'm now convinced that Celeste is the best platformer I've ever played. Here's my stats:  It's should be more like 15 hours, I left the game on pause for 4 hours at one point and it looks like it still counts that time. My first playthrough was something like 50 hours for reference. If you like platformers and somehow haven't tried this yet, you really should.
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Jan 9, 2022 23:35
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6. We Were Here This is a co-op first person puzzle game where the gimmick is you and a partner are each in different parts of a castle and have to describe things to each other to solve puzzles, so for example there might be a series of symbols you have to match across your two areas. It's pretty short, but most of the puzzles are decent, and it's free to play on Steam if this sounds at all interesting. There's a couple of sequels I might check out at some point.
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Feb 6, 2022 21:25
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7. Yoku's Island Express This is a cross between pinball and a metroidvania. It's kind of a weird combination and very gimmicky, but it worked well for a short game - I think anything much longer would have outstayed its welcome. It's very cute and has fun colourful environments, I'd say it's worth checking out if any of that sounds at all appealing.
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Feb 13, 2022 02:02
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Fungah! posted:i liked yhis a lot but didnt want to get rhe rest of the collectables after i beat it. fun concept and gameplay though I was the same, I didn't really do any of the side content or collectable hunting. It was just a bit too annoying to navigate the island when you're backtracking. Also 8. Portal 2 Co-op Campaign I've played this before around when it came out, but I'd pretty much completely forgotten the solutions at this point. It's still fantastic.
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Feb 14, 2022 01:04
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9. Elden Ring The first two thirds or so I thought was amazing, although the later parts dragged a bit for me; I still put over a 100 hours into this which is way more than I usually would for a first playthrough of any game. It doesn't top Sekiro in the FromSoft hierarchy for me, but it's definitely up there with the best of the others.
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Apr 30, 2022 20:35
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10. Stacklands Cute little city-builder type game where you stack cards in combinations to make different cards. It's very short but worth the $5 if you like that sort of thing.
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May 16, 2022 23:01
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11. Loom I feel like I've played this before but I didn't remember very much of it. It's a LucasArts point and click adventure game, but there's a gimmick where instead of the usual inventory management puzzles, you learn magic spells in the form of songs. It's very short, like 2-3 hours long, and it's quite silly. I enjoyed it.
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May 23, 2022 00:25
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12. A Plague Tale: Innocence This was an alright puzzle-stealth kind of game - it felt a bit old fashioned following Hitman/Dishonored which allow you so much freedom and creativity in how you want to get around, as it's very linear and it felt like I was trying to find the predetermined route through each section. I liked the setting (Medieval France) and story well enough to finish it though, and it was free on GamePass.
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Jun 29, 2022 00:27
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Major Isoor posted:Oh hey, I got this a few days ago in the Steam sale. If you happen to know, how long (roughly) did it take you to get through? Seems like an interesting setting, I agree - I figured it wouldn't be quite as smooth compared to Dishonored and the like though, as you said As Pablo said, it's not super long. I did like it, and I wouldn't even say it was bad compared to newer stealth games, it just felt like the design was a little outdated.
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Jun 29, 2022 14:05
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13. Neon White (All gifts and all Ace medals) Super fun game although the story is kind of annoying. It's a first person platformer/shooter where each gun you pick up can be cashed in for a movement ability, and there's an emphasis on speedrunning and finding shortcuts through the levels. Once you understand the mechanics you can really blast through the levels, and if you have a couple other people playing you can compare times on the leaderboard in game.
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Jul 11, 2022 17:43
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14: AI: The Somnium Files This is a VN by the same team that did the Nonary Game. I really enjoyed it, it was a lot less high concept than the nonary games series: the story is a more straightforward detective plot which I think worked in its favour, as it didn't have to keep explaining crazy game rules or how everything fits into a giant meta-plot, and there were a lot of interesting mysteries and twists and turns that all ended up being resolved in a satisfying way. It was let a bit down by some of the game elements, the "escape room" equivalents to Nonary Game weren't nearly as good, but that was forgivable given how great the story turned out.
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Jul 17, 2022 15:40
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15: Zero Time Dilemma This is the third and last entry in the nonary games series (999 and Virtue's Last Reward). It's been a while since I played those, so maybe I'm remembering them more fondly than they deserve, but this one definitely felt like the weakest in the series. The story was pretty interesting but it's all told through cutscenes rather than dialogue boxes, so you can't skip, and it moves very slowly. There's also some wonky pacing where something interesting will be about to happen, but then we pause for 10 minutes while the characters discuss some pseudo-science thing that relates to what's going on and you lose all the momentum. I did like the story, the set up was a new twist on the previous two games, and the way it tied into those was clever. It's probably worth it if you're a fan of the series, but it was hard to go back to after AI Somnium Files which was way better in my opinion. Edit: Oh I also beat Gun Mute at some point but i don't think it's long enough to get its own entry. I liked it for what it was I guess. 16. God of War (2018) I hadn't realised how close I was to the end on this but I rolled credits on it today as well. I don't think I'm going back in for the optional content, I loved the playthrough but I've had enough of this at least for the moment. I don't know what more I can add as I'm sure this has been talked about a lot, but it's great. Aston fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Aug 15, 2022 |
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Aug 15, 2022 17:02
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17. Monster Hunter World: Iceborne (rolled credits at least, I don't know if this counts) This has been a long time coming, I played through the whole thing with the same group and arranging times was pretty tricky so it's been over a year since we started. Worth it though, it's such a great game. I'm sure we'll try and get together for more of the postgame/endgame/whatever you want to call it, but I'm going to call it completed for now.
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Aug 27, 2022 01:33
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18. Cult of the Lamb This is a base-builder with rogue-lite dungeon crawling, where you go through dungeons to gather resources and bring back to your base to improve it and make you stronger for the next run etc. It started off strong but I felt like it didn't really deliver on the promising beginning, which was a little disappointing, but there was enough enjoyment there that I'm not unhappy to have played it. I'd be interested to see where this goes, because the loop of dungeon crawl -> get resources -> improve base -> dungeon crawl was very addictive during the parts where the balance was working well.
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Aug 29, 2022 23:21
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19. Journey I've been meaning to play this for ages and yeah, it was good.
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Aug 30, 2022 19:15
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20. Citizen Sleeper I've heard this compared with Disco Elysium in a couple places but I would say that's quite superficial, it's definitely its own thing. It's somewhere between a point and click adventure and RPG, I liked the story (and apparently there's a bunch of different endings which is cool), it's not too long, and it's free on GamePass. Nice little game.
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Sep 3, 2022 10:13
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Major Isoor posted:10) A Plague Tale: Innocence It looks like it's coming to GamePass
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Sep 4, 2022 21:15
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21. Prey: Mooncrash This is DLC for Prey, but it's pretty much its own self-contained game. I had heard it described as "Prey but roguelike" before I picked it up, which sort of put me off, but I don't think that's a very accurate description. You do play through repeatedly and if you die you have to restart, but the map is always the same apart from small details - a door might be broken on one run, need a keycard on the next, or be only openable by hacking, for example. The enemy and item layouts change and there are various hazards that can spawn, but they more make you mix up the way you get somewhere rather than change where you need to go. The other big difference is that you can play as five different characters, and you do runs sequentially, so anything you affect with the first character will stay that way for the second one and so on. I liked it, it was a unique experience thanks to this structure which I haven't seen in any other game - it had elements of a roguelike or randomizer, there was some meta-puzzle elements as you have to set things up for a later character with an earlier one, and the story was interesting. My only slight complaint was that the characters didn't feel that different, I think mainly due to my getting the ability to start with a silenced pistol and ammo very early which seemed like the best approach for everyone. There also wasn't too much of the need to carry things over between characters, I would have liked to see that be explored a bit further with maybe specific tasks that need to be accomplished by using the characters in different orders - as it was, I can only think of one section where that was strictly necessary to progress. Anyway, I'd definitely recommend it if you like Prey or Arkane's other games.
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Oct 4, 2022 18:52
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22. The Past Within: This is a co-op point and click adventure in the Rusty Lake series. It is kind of a weird co op in that you don't connect to each other's games, instead there'll be like a puzzle that player one has instructions for player two to carry out, and then it'll switch, so it's constantly verifying that both players have progressed the same amount. It's kind of cool that they managed to do non-networked co op but it did get annoying to have to keep entering codes just to say "I'm at this part now". Otherwise, it was a fine escape room style game, it was like five bucks and played in an hour and a half.
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Nov 9, 2022 21:42
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23. The Case of the Golden Idol I saw all the comparisons to Obra Dinn in this thread and went in with high hopes, and I can understand the comparison but it does fall short of that admittedly very high bar. It was a little too handholdy with the way it guided you through each puzzle, but at the same time a few of the stories had so many blanks it was difficult to work out what they wanted you to put in. The clues in the scenarios also felt very "gamey" compared with Obra Dinn, where everything felt very organic and real, and I found that took me out of things whenever I noticed it. It also crashed at one point and corrupted my save, and the game's given solution was to link to a google drive with save files up to the end of each chapter so I could replace the corrupted one, which I found funny. I'm glad that people are taking inspiration from Obra Dinn with these kinds of games and even if this one isn't the best, it still managed to capture that feeling a little, which is impressive. If you liked Obra Dinn and temper your expectations a bit more than I did, I think you'll enjoy it.
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Nov 22, 2022 23:24
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24. CrossCode This has taken me a long time to finish even though I really enjoyed it - I broke off my playthrough a bit over halfway through when Elden Ring came out, and only came back to it recently. I found out about this from a Razbuten video about "indie games that you might not have tried", having never heard of it before, and I agree with his review that it's crazy this game isn't talked about in the same way as the other indie darlings like Undertale or Braid or whatever. It's a top-down sort of zelda/rpg hybrid but both the combat and the puzzles were pushed to their absolute limit - most of the enemies are sort of mini puzzles in that there's a certain way to break their defence and deal them a lot of damage, and some of them are incredibly inventive with this, and the puzzles (which were the highlight for me) are explorations of a particular mechanic and were mind-bending but never felt unfair. I even liked the story, although your mileage may vary - there's a bunch of layers given the set up which is that you're trapped in a MMO, so you're playing through the story of the game you're in, there's a meta story of what's going on with your character, and then there's a sort of side story of the other players you meet along the way. For whatever reason, the experience of making real friendships online really struck a chord with me right after the pandemic, who would have thought. The actual writing was really good as well, I laughed out loud multiple times which is pretty rare for a game. The only unfortunate part for me was the ending, as there's a "point of no return" which I went through severely underleveled and had to knock the difficulty down a bit to finish, which left a slightly bad taste in my mouth, but other than that I can't say enough positive things about this game. I loved it.
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Nov 30, 2022 00:25
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Plebian Parasite posted:Cross/Code is interesting in that has a lot of cool stuff goin on in it, and I had a lot of fun with it, but there's just something there that stops it from being a 'great' game. Like, literally every person that's played it has fallen off it at some point because despite everything it just loving drags at points. It's far from perfect and I have a lot of gripes with it, including the pacing, but I think it still deserves to be up there in the pantheon of indie darlings and I feel like I barely hear it mentioned.
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Dec 1, 2022 19:41
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25. Jedi Fallen Order It's like Sekiro-lite-lite-lite but I love Sekiro so much that even that was enough for me. It had some cool moments, and some frustrating moments, but overall I liked it - the most annoying thing for me was that there are secrets to find but most of them just unlock cosmetics, which I don't care about, but a very few are actually useful like more health, more force power, and extra heals, which meant I felt like I had to do the exploring but 9 times out of 10 I was disappointed. I also somehow managed to miss all the extra heals until about 10 hours into the 12 hour game, so a lot of the second half felt more difficult than it needed to be as the "bonfires" spaced out more but I didn't have more heals to compensate. The story wasn't anything special but it didn't annoy me or anything, and I did like pretty much all of the characters. I'll definitely play the sequel but probably not until it's on discount or GamePass.
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Dec 29, 2022 00:57
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elf help book posted:its full of people standing near cliffs and you can force push them so its pretty good overall Going into a fight with the black suited troopers with the special purple weapons and immediately pushing them off a cliff never got old
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Dec 29, 2022 22:10
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 00:53 |
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26. Haiku the Robot This is a pretty cute metroidvania which is very much in the mould of Hollow Knight - a lot of the mechanics, areas, even one of the bosses seemed almost directly lifted from it. But Hollow Knight is a good game and so is this. It doesn't have the scope that Hollow Knight does, I finished it in a bit less than 7 hours, but I don't think it suffers from it. It controls really well, traversal is fun, and even though I ended up backtracking a lot I didn't mind as with a few upgrades you can get around fast, and it never felt like it took a long time to get anywhere. You're not really given any direction on what to do or where to go at the start, which is very liberating but also could be overwhelming when you come into a room with 4 exits and follow one down to another room with 4 exits so I ended up with a lot of unexplored paths to keep track of. Overall I liked it, and if you want more Hollow Knight maybe you'd like it to. However I have to say I hate the colour palette they chose and the font looks like default Arial or something, which wasn't great, but that didn't detract too much.
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Dec 31, 2022 15:39
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