2023 January
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This is like GeoGuessr, except across time and not space. I am very bad at it.
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🔗 Cine2Nerdle via web
Haven't played any daily puzzle games in a while, but I enjoyed this one. Went through all the archives already. Try it if you're a movie buff!
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Citizen Sleeper is a narrative-focused RPG set in a distant cyberpunk future, set around the themes of poverty and evil corporations and such. Here's me playing through the first part of the game: Gameplay consists primarily of rolling dice at the start of each day, and using those dice to perform actions. It's primarily a menu-based narrative game more than anything else. It's kind of like one of those old choose-your-old-aventure-style books that also made you track stats and roll dice. Your cybernetic body is constantly decaying, and as it decays you have access to less and less dice. Obviously -
Vampire Survivors isn't the kind of game I usually play, but it got some buzz a while back and it was available on PC Game Pass, so I thought I'd try it out right after Christmas: If you're not familiar with Vampire Survivors, it's a pixel-art action roguelike where you walk around a stage and your weapons automatically fire and you are swarmed by enemies and you have to try to survive. Killing enemies drops gems which you pickup to gain experience, which lets you get new weapons, passives, or upgrades. Each run starts off a bit slow but towards
2022 December
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A game I picked up late in 2022 is Marvel Snap, because of course I need yet another card game that I'll be playing daily! It helped that I'm a big Marvel fan, of course. Marvel Snap isn't like the other card games I usually play though. Instead of trying to kill the other player, you're vying for control of three lanes, each of which has a location card with a special ability. Each turn you get an increasing amount of energy (like Hearthstone!) to play your cards into whichever lanes you like, and after a set number of turns -
This is only the second game I'm playing in the main Shin Megami Tensei series (the first one being SMT IV on the 3DS). If you're not familiar with the series, it's basically Pokemon except instead of adorable little monsters that magically fit in a small ball, you carry around a party of demons that fit in your... soul I guess? They aren't "demonic" demons, at least not all of them. They are mostly figures from various legends and mythologies; you got your Zeus and your Thor and your Vishnu, etc. And instead of going out to collect things or -
Over the past couple of years, I've been regularly playing digital boardgames online on Steam with one of my friend groups, I thought I'd do reviews of them. Today's review is for Gloomhaven, the one we most played in 2022. Previously: Root, Blood Rage, Scythe, Sentinels of the Multiverse. Gloomhaven is a coop game for up to 4 players. It's an RPG where you form a party and tackle turn-based dungeons (with some lore/story tacked on). I can only imagine how much effort playing the physical version of this game takes, because there's a lot of stuff. There are many -
Tunic is a cute little Zelda-like with a unique twist: The game barely tells you anything and most text is written in an unknown runic script/language, but you can collect these pages that turn out to be from an in-game instruction manual (also mostly written in the unknown language), and as you find more pages, you figure out more stuff about the world and the game and how to do stuff in the game. The game was incredibly fun and I spent some late nights because I couldn't put the controller down. The exploration part was excellent, and the game -
A few weeks ago, I finally hit achievement completion in Street Fighter V! Quick review: Despite the game getting some poor reviews at the start, I think it has grown into a pretty good entry in the franchise. It's been a long and challenging road, mainly because despite my love of fighting games, I am so so bad at them, so I never thought I would be able to overcome the achievements that required me to rank up online, but somehow through perseverence I got there! A timeline! 2015: Played the SFV demo at EGX 2016: Played in open beta
2022 November
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Today I finished Paradise Killer, which is the first game I finished on PC Game Pass, which I subscribed to three months ago. That's not a great rate, but my first three months were free due to some promo, so whatever. Paradise Killer wasn't my first choice of game to play on Game Pass though, I had a few other games I had wanted to play first, but it turns out the XBox app needed to play PC Game Pass games is super wonky and gave me a lot of problems. As I mentioned in a previous weeknotes, I had
2022 August
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According to Steam achievements, I've been playing the same Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings game on and off since 2018. Finally decided to power through the remainder of the game this year to get it off my backlog. The game is okay, considering it came out in 2011. Graphics are from that era of course, but I'm not one to complain. The combat is challenging and can be a bit clunky. There are multiple boss battles that I had to redo countless times and most of the time you have to prep ahead of time by drinking potions and applying
2022 July
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🔗 Hexagonal Pipes Puzzle via web
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Finished my second big RPG for the year! Triangle Strategy by Squaresoft is a new "spiritual successor" to one of all-time favorite games, Final Fantasy Tactics. This game was great! Although the name seriously lacked imagination. "Triangle" because there are three main factions and three conviction values in the game, and "Strategy" because it's a strategy game! I really liked the story, even though it was a "Oh we are a small group trapped between warring powers" plot that's typical for these kinds of games. There's decision points and branching paths along the way, and each of the major factions
2022 June
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Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a pretty good metroidvania, heavily influenced by the classic Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. (I will confess that I have never played SOTN; I did play the successor games on GBA and NDS though.) The game is easy. It's not a hardcore platformer like Ori and the Blind Forest and it doesn't have the challenging combat of Hollow Knight. The lack of difficulty is mainly because there is no real limit on the number of restorative items you can bring into a boss fight. For this reason, the later boss fights (when you have
2022 May
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I started playing Tales of Vesperia in January, since I had just finished Tales of Symphonia a couple of weeks prior. Vesperia is that rare PS3 era RPG that never got an English-language release on that system, so I've actually been wanting to play this for more than a decade now, though I actually bought the game only during last year's end-of-year Steam sales. This game is a vast improvement over Symphonia; kind of a surprise considering the original games were released a mere 5 games apart. I'm not sure if it's just the Definitive Edition remaster, but the graphics
2022 April
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I finished Metroid Dread today! The game came out for Nintendo Switch last October and my brother lent me his copy last month. This was only my second time finishing an actual Metroid game; the first one was the original Metroid all the way back on the NES! I loved the game, I devoured it in a bit over three weeks (which is a very quick pace for me already). It is an excellent side-scrolling Metroidvania (as you'd expect) and has a great gameplay loop where every time you beat a boss you unlock a new ability and you want
2022 March
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Yesterday I finished Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair, a platformer released on Steam in 2019. I started playing this one in mid-February, mostly because I wanted a shorter non-RPG game to play alongside Tales of Vesperia, and I had this in the backlog for a while. Not a big fan of the aesthetic (it's obviously geared more towards kids), but the game itself is fun enough. The game consists of a top-down Zelda-like overworld where you unlock secrets and new chapters, and the chapters themselves are individual 2D platforming stages, in the modern Mario style: you just want to get
2022 February
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I've still been playing Wordle since the last time I wrote about it. Still 100% win rate, and currently on 24-day streak (would have been longer, except in early January, I decided to test what would happen if I set my system date to the future since the game uses the client's date). Aside from the OG Wordle, two variants have also made their way into my daily routine (technically four variants, depending on how you count them): Saltong, the Filipino version which I already mentioned in the last post. This one actually has three different variants: there's normal Saltong
2022 January
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🔗 Wiki History Game via web
Web game where you need to rearrange historical events chronologically. Best streak I got so far is 9.
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For a long time I had been waffling on buying Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker for either the WiiU or Switch, since I did find myself enjoying the Captain Toad levels in Super Mario 3D World. Last week however for some reason, Nintendo decided to make the game free to play for one week. A strange decision, given the game takes less than 10 hours to complete! It incentivizes people with a lot of time (like me!) to just download the free trial and finish it in that period. So that's what I did! For the uninitiated, Captain Toad is a