I've never liked traditional RTS games, not the classics, not the modern ones either. With the exception of the Close Combat series which are completely different. So when I found out Brutal Legend had a major RTS component for progression, my liking for it went way down.

Hello Dogmaus!

"VVVVVV" and "Don't look back" are some of my favourite indiegames since their original release by Terry Cavanagh, 'long' before the whole indiegame craze had begun.

The semi-open world and trinket collecting of "VVVVVV" always felt to me like a mechanically streamlined 'metroidvania'. I mean, remove the item-locked gates and roleplaying stats of newer incarnations, and you still have the interconnected semi-open world and sense of discovery! And I absolutely agree with you on the catchy soundtrack. It achieved to actually resemble somewhat those old 8-bit tunes from the classics by focussing on simple but strong melodies.
The sense of humour in the room (screen) descriptions is worth the effort alone!

"Don't look back" on the other hand often reminded me of the game "Another World" ('Out of This World' in some regions), heavy focus on atmosphere and not knowing what lies ahead until you are realising to where you are heading.
It is concise (others might call it short) but left an impression on me.

I still do return frequently to both of these games, and the possibility of even finishing them in one brief gaming session makes them more approachable / accessible to me.

(The reflex test called "Super Hexagon" from the same developer I did not managed to beat entirely, yet.)

Regarding my recently finished game:

I revisited "Firewatch" and was positively impressed how well the game depicts its scenario. It really felt like you are actually hiking! Depending on your choice in the game's options menu, you really have to navigate by aid of a 'paper map', a compass and orientate yourself with respect to landmarks - or call in for some direction from the other fire lookout. And the voice acting is really authentic (or believable).

Usually, the game is being critizised for being a 'walking simulator', nothing extraordinary in the game's story, effectively no impact on the outcome and hence, lack of replayability.
But I think, it is worthwhile to play it again either after some time has passed (when your memory of it has faded a bit) or when you feel like doing something relaxing including enjoying beautiful vistas, that does not involve a lot of action (epsecially neither shooting nor killing stuff) nor heavy-handed drama.

To my surprise I did enjoy it a second time (almost as much as on my first one) and more so than, for instance, "Dear Esther" or the like. I think because "Firewatch" puts you in a more open area with multiple pathways often for you to choose of how to get there, lets you explore to a larger extend, still featuring a lot of minor details for the player to dicover.

Kind regards,
foxgog

I replayed it last year and also enjoyed it very much (again). The final battle took two or three tries for me. I won by casting several area spells like wall of fire, fog cloud, entangle, cloudkill etc. at the same time, in order to distract and slow down the enemies while causing them repeated damage. You also need to ask the Genie the right wishes, which will make the battle much easier. With this tactic the last battle is much less frustrating than in some other SSI games (looking at you, Gateway to the Savage Frontier).

After almost 10 hour long Saturday marathon of Dark Souls II New Game 2+ on my PS3, I've finaly achieved Platinum Trophy. This time, I have gone only for the mandatory bosses and left Lost Sinner as a last one. Up until her, it went very smooth and I had to my surprise inly 3 or 4 deaths. Then she decided to whip my ass with her big sword, and I went few time really angry. Especially when one of my controllers started to malfunction once in a while, which caused me at least 4 deaths. My DeathCounter stopped at 1474 :D, with only 36 deaths in this NG2+ run. In total, I spent little bit over 210 hours on this game, and enjoyed every single second of it, with the exception of Shrine of Amana, which sucked walrus balls!


All of my games finished in 2020 can be found >>>HERE<<<

Grim Fandango Remastered

When I started it, it was meant as another adventure that was a freebie that I hoped to get through relatively quickly and give myself a fighting chance of finishing a couple more games this year... And it took me four months to finish. (Admittedly, started a month before finishing Lionheart, so didn't touch it much during that time.) There will be a review, mainly focused on the "remastered" part and less about the game itself, but the notes I threw together while playing are these:

Would sure have liked to be able to highlight what I can interact with, and a proper inventory. A journal would help too. But at least they added point and click controls, don't want to think about playing the game without them and trying to find everything. There are still a number of items with no such controls though, albeit nothing you can actually use, at least as far as I could tell. The developer commentary is quite messy, they could have taken some care to speak better, and text often faster than speech, can get confusing, and quite a number of them have tiny trigger areas. See a brief commentary notification at the end of the car ride to the final area but too brief to hit the button, and doubt it'd work during a cutscene, so maybe bug and not a missed commentary, but not sure. I did like that commentary worked as hints in places too, though others might not. Some bugs when running to things you can interact with, or even when leaving areas, may even require reloading or even forcing the game to close. Manipulating the crane's chain in year 3 is particularly glitchy, game hanging multiple times. Used a guide for some hints otherwise too, but the key puzzle for the way to Rubacava required me actually reading the full solution, how the heck are you supposed to figure that out? Also needed a hint for the wine cask thing, and to learn there are two counters, would have never thought I could go that way to find the second for some reason. And no way I'd have ever thought of the way to get strip searched, read full solution there! Needed hint for the light at the start of year three too, and maybe I'd have figured it out eventually but by trial and error without really looking for the right thing, so hint was useful for floating out too. And odd that Glottis is clickable in the engine room but Manny doesn't look at him and if you click him Manny goes to the anchor control, and at The Pearl if you try to talk with the one with the light next to the rock you move back to the first screen and talk there, also in year 3 clicking on the papers in the secretary's office has you go to the children's books. Wrong names in transcript of first year 2 commentaries. Year 2 seems confusing at times, missing context, and can be tricky to find the locations you want too, also a comment that's out of place if you explore too soon in year 3. Music is fitting, can't argue with that. Good acting too.

Damn, GOG forum has lost several posts I have made. Briefly, I recommend to Another World fans, to play the Eternal Castle, that in its fake CGA graphics tries to make you believe it was a game ahead of its time, that predates Another World. It is in fact a hystorical fake, but well deserving to be played. It can be voted here:
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/the_eternal_castle_remastered

I fear that Firewatch story and chatting would annoy me, but I would like to do the exploration thing. Maybe one day!

I have finished Dandara. Pretty solid game 2D metroidvania, with a few annoyances - like leaving the player without really knowing what to do, a confused and absurd story with senseless dialogues, really ugly white screens every time some item is found, and the need to repeat the same sequence several times in a raw, like when you die before the final boss battle and the savepoint is too far from the battleground. It excels at being original in the way the character moves and exploiting it well in its mechanics, expecially towards the endgame. Ithas a distinct feeling and you never think you are playing just another platformer. Many of the powers you can optionally acquire are used underwhelmingly. A few puzzles are quite clever, there's plenty of unnecessary - read optional - stuff that is real fun. I think I am going to play it again, maybe on a tablet to try the touch movements or on a Switch if I can get one.

You wrote great review, I totally agree with you! I remember when I got Score magazine in November 1998 with Grim Fandango demo, it was great game! When I later played full version (much later, it was already Remastered) I found out, that rest of game is not so good as demo. This game has its ups and downs and some parts are really confusing without possibility to find rationally what to do next.

Maid of Sker (XB1X)

It's a 6-7 hour horror stealth game. Some would say walking sim, but I wouldn't as you need to avoid powerful enemies and solve simple puzzles- either by finding notes to give clues or brute force like I did with the beer tap puzzle. I'd say it's closest to something like Amnesia. Without giving away the actual story, I can say that it's set in a run down Welsh hotel and it revolves around mind control through music. Likewise the enemies are blind, but can hear you. I actually liked it overall, despite the enemies becoming annoying near the end. If you read the notes you can find, the story pieces together quite well. The horror feel is more via tension and mood, with only about 2 jumps scares that I remember.

Technically my first impressions were really bad. The game was just not smooth at all. But there are a few graphics options, one being to remove the frame cap- which was set to on by default probably with a standard Xbox One in mind. I suspect that, like many Unity games, the 30 fps cap is broken and actually running at 31, it just felt bad. Taking the 30 fps cap off surprisingly made a night and day difference. Suddenly it was super smooth on an XB1X, probably not locked to 60 but obviously within freesync range for my TV pretty much all the way. Anyway I'm glad I played it, not an all time classic or anything but solid. Was a GwG game this month.

Games I finished in 2020:

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - always super cosy, I really love the atmosphere in this game.

Planescape Torment - fantastic writing, fascinating lore, combat is a lot of fun with a full party too. This is one I'm going to replay again very soon.

Thief 2: The Metal Age - Loving the emphasis on technology in this one, but Thief 1 will always be my favourite in the series. Karras' voice is so damn annoying though.

Hitman: Blood Money - My favourite Hitman game, it's so neat replaying different levels to find new ways to take out your targets.

Myst - Always fiddled about with Myst but never finished it until a few weeks ago. Really gorgeous puzzle design, very clever ideas and a lovely atmosphere. Goes well with a nice cup of coffee.

The Suffering - This game used to scare me so much as a kid, but playing it as an adult, the shooting in this game is so damn good. I love the monster designs too, they're very inventive. Different endings makes this one worth replaying.

Professor Layton and the Last Spectre - The only console game on this list as I played the rest of these games through GOG, but Professor Layton is so lovely. Charming story, beautiful animation, a fun variety of different puzzles. I love this series so much.

Flatout 2 - I love a good racing game, especially when they get so chaotic like the Flatout games. Such a shame Flatout 3 isn't meant to be very good, but Flatout 2 is a step up from the first one. Would recommend!

That wasn't the review, those were just some quick notes I took while playing. My reviews tend to really get away from me and get to 3000-3500 words :)) Since in this one I mean to mainly focus on the remaster and less on the game itself, hoping to keep it to half that, but we'll see...

TimeShift

I was relatively close to the ending when I took a longer break, so now I just powered through to be done with it, even though it wasn't that much fun anymore. The game has some cool aspects, but all in all it's also a bit bland, IMO.

First, the good things: The time manipulation mechanics are neat, even if I mostly just used them to slow time so that I could take better aim; I wasn't particularly motivated to get that creative with them when I was not required to. The explosive crossbow is an overpowered but very enjoyable weapon, and most of the times I didn't really use anything else, until I ran out of ammunition. The quicksave system is exemplary - no more accidentally overwriting your last quicksave with a worse state, the game just quicksaves to a new slot and keeps a number of backups from your previous quicksaving, in addition to autosaves and regular manual saves. I wonder why a system like this is such a rare occurrence and hasn't become standard by now.

The quickload system is not quite as good, unfortunately. Apparently quickloading won't work while time mode is active, so you need to toggle it off first, and it won't work on the death screen either. When you die, the screen prompt asks you to "Press F to continue" instead, then sends you back to the main menu, where you can click on "Continue" in order to load the last quicksave, but that's pretty roundabout and not quick at all; "Press F to load last quicksave" would have been much more convenient. Or at least enable the F9 quickload button even when you're dead. I felt some actions were mapped to inconvenient keys as well, but luckily you can configure controls. The most striking irritation for me was that there is no Run or Sprint key, there is just normal speed and slower crouching speed. Not even time mode changes anything about that. If you expected to be able to dart around due to your time speeding abilities, you will be disappointed: it might appear that way to your enemies when time slows around you, but you yourself will be just as low as always, when you "dart" past them. It's especially tedious in larger outdoor areas, and weird if you're under fire, calmly "walking" to the next cover.

For a linear story-oriented shooter, the story is a bit barebones and not very interesting. Apart from the time travel idea, the setting is all just war-torn ruins and military compounds, all brown and gray (okay, there was a bit of white snow, too, that was probably the most exciting change of scenery), and opponents are all just male soldiers in various armor suits and with different weapons, with the exception of some bigger mech (controlled by another human). There are NPCs talking all the time to give background on your missions (or more precisely, ordering you around), but they are hard to distinguish from each other, they all look like the same muscular military men models, just like the enemies, and I found their babbling more distracting than immersive, especially in the midst of combat. You can easily miss something about your task because of that, but there is still a mission screen telling you what is expected of you and target indicators on the map. Occasionally there is a side mission you can fail, but it doesn't really seem to matter either way. Also, once when I completed a side quest (defeat all enemies in the area, which I did - I searched and looked everywhere and there was noone left), the game didn't properly register it and still told me I failed. The end boss sucked, as always, it's either a frustrating experience, or a very, very easy challenge, if you find the exploits.

So I would say the game has some interesting mechanics that might have been more fun in a better game, but even though everything works fine, it's really not all that spectacular in its own right. Due to its linearity and quicksaving and time stopping and all that, I was driven to play casually, just a little more, and then some, but over the length of 8-12 hours, it kind of loses its steam. Unless you're a die hard fan of such modern shooters, or you're historically interested in some of its mechanics, I probably wouldn't really recommend it; there are definitely better FPS out there.

Little Nightmares, Oct 18 (GOG)-A creepy, Burtonesque puzzle-platformer with a similar feel to Limbo. The graphics were pretty terrifying and some of the puzzles and chases were really tense. But unfortunately it didn't quite live up to my expectations. The controls were a little clunky at times and I had a habit of getting stuck on invisible things on the floors or in doorways. There also seemed to be a difficulty spike at the beginning running and hiding from the guy with long arms and after that it got rather easy. All of that is forgivable though. I can't quite articulate what I didn't like about it but I didn't like Limbo too much either.

Full List

Outlaws. One of my favorite FPSs. I just love its sense of style, with the spaghetti western influence in the graphics and music, and it has some of the best weapon sounds in any shooting game. Blasting guys with the shotgun never gets old. I also appreciate how its reloading mechanic makes you take a more measured approach to the game compared to other FPSs.

I just played it on easy this time because I wanted to have a quick run through it, but it gets pretty tough on the higher difficulties. It's kind of like Shogo in how the enemies are just as capable of one-shotting you as you are of them, so you need to be very careful in many spots. Also, being a Lucasarts game, there's a bit more of a puzzle-solving aspect to it, which can get frustrating when you're running all over the massive (seriously, they're huge) levels, not sure what you're overlooking.

I always got stuck at that sawmill level where you quickly have to pull a lever somewhere while being carried away by the fast current of a water channel or so. Never made it past that point. :(

The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit

I loved it. There's hardly any plot, it's more of a playground, and you can trigger the story end prematurally and miss a lot of things, but thankfully the game saves before it and let's you continue from that state afterwards, if you want to. And the meat of the game is not the plot, but open exploration and story-telling in the way of introducing a character that hopefully will play more than a marginal role in Life is Strange 2. It certainly does its job of getting me hooked, so that now I want to try and play the actual game, too (knocking on wood that my GPU will be able to run it fine).

I could imagine that someone out for more plot would be disappointed, when the credits roll as soon as they did for me, but if you take your time to explore and do all the quests, there is an amazing amount of high quality content for a free teaser game like this. It's very cinematic, in a calm, touching indie movie kind of way, with a limited but great soundtrack once again (featuring a song by Sufjan Stevens and one by Bat for Lashes). The young main character is voiced by an actual boy, not an adult, and he is pretty good at it. It was a joy to just stroll around the house and the yard, looking at things through the eyes of this sweet, imaginative kid with his superhero fantasies. And in the end I actually spent close to three hours on this game that could probably be finished in 15 minutes or so, if you know how and just rush through. I had some issues with two rather obscure puzzles involving codes - those could have done with some hints, but apart from that, I thought it really was awesome.