Unicorn Overlord - One of the best games I've played this year (maybe ever) The story was really enjoyable, the combat felt rewarding and the characters were likable and interesting.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes - The story was mediocre, the combat wasn't bad, the characters were fun to find and recruit but the game had a few too many moments where you'd be soft-locked into a boss rush and if you weren't fully prepared you might have to give up on your run (unless you kept multiple saves) just finishing the game felt like an achievement.
Warhammer Mechanicus - Another game that was part of my experiment of other genres (it's a tactical RPG) It was a rough playthrough and the game does everything it can to pound you into the ground right from the start but becomes more balanced around mid-game. The soundtrack/score is absolutely brilliant too. They are making a 2nd one so I needed to finally try the first one.
I didn't game all summer so I jumped on a couple of random ones from the backlog.
These violent delights have violent ends & in their triumph die, like fire & powder Which, as they kiss, consume.
@Herculean It's really good and it might be worth Googling missable characters if you don't mind some light spoilers. I missed one that kept coming up in team build guides and almost considered starting again just to get them. Other than that it's pretty easy to pick up and play, kind of relaxing too considering you build your teams then send them into auto combat. The only downside is I struggled to find similar games on console, I'll probably play through it again after the next Pathfinder game.
These violent delights have violent ends & in their triumph die, like fire & powder Which, as they kiss, consume.
Done with Octopath Traveler. Well, technically; I have all the jobs and done almost all of the side quests, completed chapter 4 for each character. Only thing I haven't done is Galdera. There are no saves in the final area, and there is a boss gauntlet before fighting Galdera. The gauntlet is fine, but I didn't realise all characters would be needed. Half of my party is severely under-leveled and I do not want to waste 20 hours grinding.
Good to have finally beat it though. Been sat on my shelf since it launched in 2018, though I played through on PS5.
Need for Speed Shift 2 Unleashed done. Great improvement over the first one in every area except audio, there’s no music in races and I hate that. There’s also pretty much zero progression, just loads of races. And the helmet cam thing is very impressive but makes me feel physically sick. Good game though, handling’s nice, lots of tracks and cars and crashes are terrifying. Genuinely not that far off a Gran Turismo on the track, just miles off when it comes to basically everything else. I’ve almost finished Hot Pursuit Remastered too, which is sort of great and sort of annoying, the vehicular combat Cop stuff is amazing but the actual races are just rubberbanding galore, point to point races that you struggle to do while being murdered by the AI over and over again. Weird series all round.
Pathfinder Wrath of The Righteous. It did a great job of explaining the mechanics (it's based off a table-top game) and gave more than enough options to customize your experience. The first half of the game was enjoyable but it seems like the Devs opted for a lot of padding mid and late-game and very little of it didn't seem like a slog. For instance there was a whole questline that was entirely puzzle based, you'd go from one location to the next solving the same puzzles and go straight to a guide only to be met with comment after comment saying the puzzle made no sense (they really didn't) I did like the story though and the setting, enough to start an evil playthrough but my build needs a lot of tweaks which I'll eventually get around to doing. I maxed the enemies for that second playthrough which is great for the XP but a lot harder, especially for a squishy caster.
These violent delights have violent ends & in their triumph die, like fire & powder Which, as they kiss, consume.
@GirlVersusGame Congrats on the completion Have you played "Pathfinder Kingmaker"? I have purchased both games and thought I start with "Kingmaker", but would love to hear your thoughts on it if you've played it.
@FuriousMachine I bought Kingmaker last week, it came with 6 DLCs but people are saying I need to enable auto-mode on kingdom management of my saves will corrupt and the game will crash. The reason I bought it is because the reviewer on the original IGN video was crying about dungeons that went on for hours, I like the idea of long dungeons so I clicked buy. I can see why people into table-top would like a Pathfinder game, it rewards you when you know what you are doing but it's painful to watch bad dice rolls of 'miss, miss, miss' when the AI always gets the best rolls. I had no trouble with the first playthrough as a Ranger, arrows are infinite but only a few spells are. I basically tried to keep casting slumber and then have the rest of the team curb-stomp them whilst they were down (sometimes it worked) I think I ran into maybe one bug, some stuttering on a level that taxes PC too, but there were no crashes so hopefully Kingmaker follows suit. I don't even know what the DLCs are but if the base game has dungeons that go on for hours then they did something right. I'm going to try Viewfinder after Killer Frequency, I came back to a Summer off gaming to an even bigger backlog and I'm making up for it fast. I think I'll try The Invincible too and Indika, maybe even Green Hell since I love survival games. Apparently I bought Cartel Tycoon and it's DLC too, there's so much to get caught up on.
These violent delights have violent ends & in their triumph die, like fire & powder Which, as they kiss, consume.
@GirlVersusGame Cool, looking forward to playing them both. I enjoyed "Killer Frequency", despite needing some serious suspension of disbelief (someone is calling from the center of a hedgemaze... in the 80's... whaaaa?) and being quite easy/simple. Any sense of dread also goes away fairly quickly, but I still thought it was a fun couple of hours. Hope you'll have fun with it, too
I just beat Hollow Knight Silksong. It took me 48 hours for my first playthrough. It was a masterpiece through and through. I did have a complaint about the High Halls gauntlet, but stupidly realized I hadn’t upgraded my needle yet. Once I did that, I beat it first try. I found the final boss pretty easy, but it was so fun, and so was the previous fight. It was honestly peak cinema.
Killer Frequency. I played through it three times in less than 24hrs, it was too good to not want to go for 100%. The first playthrough was completely blind and easily one of the most memorable games I've played this year. It's an easy enough platinum, the hardest being the 4hr speedrun with everyone surviving, I finished that run with 30mins to spare. I don't know what will be next, bed probably.
These violent delights have violent ends & in their triumph die, like fire & powder Which, as they kiss, consume.
@Elfuggingjefe Interesting coincidence, I am also playing it right now Haven't revealed more than 18 fates and I'm beginning to get a bit stuck. "Unlocked" all the chapters (except "The Bargain", of course). I'm trying to piece together as much info as possible, but I'm finding it's becoming a bit tiresome going back to the various memories. Wish there was a quicker way to jump between them, as I'm finding myself beginning to think of the game as a chore. Loved unveiling the story, though.
@Elfuggingjefe Thanks for the tips! I will probably turn to Google after a while myself. I've had to resort to guessing more than I'm comfortable with (it feels like cheating ) but some have been educated guesses, like with the two brothers. I knew their names and their faces, but not which was which, so trial and error solved those two. Same with the two passenger women. I fear it will devolve into a case where I will, when I have two fates I'm reasonably certain of, resort to guessing on a third until it "pops". Not there yet, but we'll see how it progresses.
Love the concept, though!
Hello Neighbour 2, my first and last of the franchise. It was a really wonky start because the AI is so janky and there's no direction whatsoever. I turned it off once and was sure I'd delete it but then got stubborn and decided I wouldn't let it beat me so I went back in and pulled platinum too. The whole thing took a few hours. Viewfinder is next and then maybe I'll try Spiderman or Cyberpunk, I've managed to put off both for years.
These violent delights have violent ends & in their triumph die, like fire & powder Which, as they kiss, consume.
Viewfinder. I generally avoid puzzle games but I'm glad this wasn't the case with Viewfinder. I enjoyed every moment of it and the chill ambience and aesthetics were the real cherry on top. It's a fun 100% to chase too, it made me want to try some similar puzzle games. Which I never thought I'd say.
These violent delights have violent ends & in their triumph die, like fire & powder Which, as they kiss, consume.
Tonight I followed in @Elfuggingjefe's footsteps and completed Return of the Obra Dinn and one of the tips they gave me got the ball rolling, so huge thanks for that . I still had to do more guesswork than I would have liked and at the very end I had to resort to a guide to discover the only missing piece I had for my three remaining fates. So while I would have liked if it was less trial and error, I really enjoyed the concept and my time with the game.
I consulted a guide to see what's required for the last two trophies I need for the platinum and I'm unsure if I'll bother, as it will mean more or less another full playthrough.
I finished my first character in Borderlands 4 (in the sense that I finished the campaign plus the UVH climb) and I was pretty disappointed with the experience. I feel like a lot of the reviews for Borderlands 4 have been skewed in one direction (those who didn't like 3). 4 feels less like a meaningful evolution for the series, and more like they found the most upvoted reddit posts complaining about 3 and made a game around that. So it seems like if you didn't like 3, based on the reviews, you will love 4. But 3 is my favourite Borderlands game, and I think 2 is overrated (I confirmed this by replaying both just a few months ago) and so for me, almost every change 4 makes isn't something I wanted and makes for a worse experience. I think it sucks if this is the vision for the franchise moving forwards. So much so, when we were done with 4, my friend and I chose to replay Wonderlands rather than rolling a second character. Like don't get me wrong, 4 has the most refined moment to moment game feel in the series but everything else, at least for my tastes and what I want out of a Borderlands game, this just feels like a huge step backwards. Why would I want less Legendary drops? Why would I want fun side missions with unique loot replaced almost entirely with shopping list quests where the rewards are the same randomised loot you get from the general loot pool? Why would I want an open world, if all it means is I can't fast travel to any mission and just have to waste hours of game time driving too and from missions? Why replace incredible moments like Torgue nuking the ocean to open the map up, with just a generic Far Cry set up, where you fight villains always held at arms length from you for each campaign chunk? Four is just a vision of Borderlands devoid of joy, colour, soul or imagination.
Elden Ring. I got it at launch but it never clicked for me fully so just came back to it recently to get it off my pile of unfinished games shame. Love the Souls series but ER was mostly disappointing. Vast expanses of horseback tedium with a handful of brilliant legacy dungeons.
After 4 games I fully understand why From tried to shake up the formula but its still Dark Souls at heart and the open world did it no favours. Much prefer the tightly curated world design over whatever that was. Solid enough but nowhere near the masterpiece many claim it to be.
After a long pause, I finally went back and finished off Lost Records: Bloom & Rage.
I drifted away from it for the second half of Tape 2, and pushed myself to go back to it after a few months away and get it out of the backlog. The fact it took some effort to go back to it tells you all you need to know about how I felt about it in the end. Perhaps some of my apathy towards completing it was due to my obsession with the other game I’m playing (BG3) but I also think that Lost Records just loses its way and doesn’t land as well as Don’t Nod’s previous games.
I applaud the diverse cast and novel experience of playing as Swann, who is unlike any other protagonist I’d ever embodied. Still, the characters and their interactions feel strained and I never truly got close to any of them in the way I clicked with Chloe and Max, or the Diaz brothers.
I think the plot is okay, it has a decent ‘coming of age’ feel with some supernatural elements for which the “Life is Strange-likes” are known for. The main issue is the pacing of it all. Having played through LiS 1, 2, Before the Storm, and True Colors, I fully expected there to be a lot of slow sequences with background music as the camera pans around at some beautiful or contemplative setting, but Lost Records just feels like it drags more than any of its peers when I comes to these types of sections. And the plot just doesn’t move fast enough and by the time you get to the climax and unveil the mysteries that they introduce at the opening of the game, you basically have figured out what the twist is going to be and are just ready for it to end, even though the whole thing only takes about 15 hours.
At the conclusion, you feel very little emotion about what happens, or at least I didn’t. Which is a shame, because they could have made it work if they added some better build up and conflict. As it stands, you barely even know who to root for at the end. I know the game is likely trying to keep things morally grey and open ended as far as allegiance to the characters and their conflict, but it just doesn’t feel genuine.
I still need to play LiS: Double Exposure, but after finishing Lost Records I think I need a break from the genre for a while.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
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