I've now started a Masters degree, so games might be taking a backseat for a little while. Since my last post, I've completed quite a few. I might have mentioned some of these before.
I finally finished Marie's Room and Gone Home. The latter inspired the former and The Suicide of Rachel Foster. They're all walking simulator style games, where you wander around an empty building and find various hints - often diary entries - about what happened there. Like I said, I feel like The Suicide of Rachel Foster was weakened by not having us hear from Rachel herself in any way, so Marie's Room and Gone Home are better in those respects, as you do actually hear directly from the person the protagonist is interested in. Those two also have more uplifting endings. That said, I've been thinking about The Suicide of Rachel Foster recently and considering playing it again. What I've been thinking about is...the creators explain, very clearly, that some of the plot is implied by the objects in the hotel but not actually stated. So perhaps they intended to tell a story of madness and obsession and how a victim like Rachel is silenced, and so not hearing from her is a purposeful plot beat and not something that's missing. It's another terrible thing that was done to her. I like that interpretation better.
I played and enjoyed Plague Inc although I'm not very good at it despite having a degree in Genetics and literally working in a Covid lab while playing it. I liked that it provided a lot of context for the current scenario, though that obviously wasn't intentional. I did find that the best strategy was to get the infection spreading via coughs and sneezes and then suddenly make it deadly once it's spread everywhere.
I played through a lot of the Dark Parables series, specifically The Swan Princess and the Dire Tree, The Thief and the Tinderbox, Return of the Salt Princess, and The Match Girl's Lost Paradise. This leaves me with only one left to finish, Portrait of the Stained Princess which is the 15th game so far (I think actually 16th, but one appears to have been wiped from the internet entirely?). What's interesting is that Blue Tea Games, who made the first few games also made the last few, while those in the middle were made by, iirc, Eipix, and some are made by both companies. This means the last few games get more of the creepy feeling and horror elements that the earlier games had, which I really liked, but they retained some of the things Eipix put in, like having achievements. Unfortunately, they didn't put in the ability to just replay the main or bonus game after finishing them without having to set up an entirely new player profile, which means, if you missed a single changing object thing or parable piece in the bonus chapter then you'd need to set up a new player profile and replay the entire game from the start - making sure you didn't miss any of the things you got before - in order to find it. That's annoying. Return of the Salt Princess was one of the ones made by both, which seems to mean that it had the toughest achievements and so it's the only one for which I don't yet have all the in game achievements. I'd have to replay it again - for the third time, since the second time I got one of the things I missed but missed one of the things I got - and I just don't have the heart right now. I've really enjoyed the series, and I hope they realise another one soon. At the moment, I've played the games for a combined total of 101 hours, which makes the cost about 91p per hour (since I bought them for £91.76 in the first place), but I expect this to drop further as I finish Portrait of the Stained Princess, finish off the achievements in Return of the Salt Princess, and maybe play the games over again someday. Considering I'll spent £3-4 on a book that takes an hour or two to read, I'd say that's a bargain. I'll probably try some of the spin-offs, like Cursery or Fabled Legends. I think only one of those is one Steam.
For my birthday, my friend got me Confines of the Crown, a visual novel romance/palace intrigue game that I really enjoyed. It deals with some questions of gender identity, and while there are many things there could be improved on, I think they did an okay job (full disclosure; I cis and have never questioned my gender identity, so take that with a pinch of salt). It took me just under 5 hours to play it through in full - all endings, all achievements - and the game cost £14.99, so I'd personally wait for it to go on sale before purchasing it. I also played PSYCHO-PASS: Mandatory Happiness, another visual novel, and wrote a guide for it. While PSYCHO-PASS does have some romance plotlines, it's more of a police procedural than a romance game. One thing that's really annoying about is that the skip function doesn't work properly. There are scenes you can see as both characters which are identical but which don't skip unless you've seen both. Sometimes the game just wouldn't acknowledge that I'd previously played through a segment and let me skip it after reloading, but other times it would? This artificially inflates the playtime, although there is still a whole lot to do in the game. There's loads of different endings and scenes to unlock. I finally finished Lake of Voices as well, another romance visual novel but darker than the others by virtue of the fact that people actually die. It's very melancholy.
The biggest chunk of my time was taken up with Persona 4 Golden. I played the original game on the PS2 years ago and loved it, so it was great to play it again. I really liked the additions to this version, like two whole new social links to get to know. I played the game through twice, since one bonus boss is only available on a new game plus and I still enjoyed it the second time (though I made a lot of use of the fast-forward button). I'm considering making a day-by-day guide to maxing all stats and social links, but that would be a huge undertaking and someone else would probably have made one before I was done.
The other games I've finished are Hitman Go and The Turing Test. I'm not very dexterous so the traditional Hitman games are hard for me (I would assume, I never actually tried them but other games in that style are hard for me). I like the Go games, like Hitman Go and Lara Croft Go because they change the gameplay to something I'm better at. It's solely a logic puzzle, not a logic puzzle with added dexterity and I enjoy that. And I liked that I could play these well-known series' in a style that I enjoyed and so gain some appreciate for what everyone else is playing even if I don't want to play the main games. Speaking of games I'm not good at The Turing Test is technically the first first-person shooter game I've ever played, though it's really more of a puzzle game that uses a gun, like Portal (which I have played for several minutes with a friend). It made me a bit dizzy at first, and I did struggle, but most of the puzzles are static logic puzzles, and there's only a few that require carefully aiming while moving or anything like that. I liked that you could replay any chapter you wanted, so if you missed the optional puzzle you could just go and do that without replaying the entire game. There's no way to backtrack, each puzzle is in a discrete area, so replaying the chapters was the only way.
Apart from finishing games, I've also been permanently removing games from my Steam account. I get a lot of games from Humble Bundled which sometimes means they come bundled with other games, which I am less interested in. I added those games to my Steam account but never played them. Those, I've been playing a little bit and then deleting them if I don't enjoy them. I did also delete a few games I bought like Ms Splosion Man, which I bought in 2014 and have played for less than 2 hours, and Layers of Fear, which I got for £2.99. The latter made me feel sick and dizzy and the plot and gameplay weren't enjoyable enough for that. If I spent £3 on a coffee that made me feel that way I'd chuck it out, so same logic (if I spent £3 on alcohol that made me feel that way, that would be a lot of alcohol for very little and I'd still need to be in the right mood). This does throw off my spreadsheet calculations about what I've spent on games and the time spent playing them, but the point of this whole thing isn't really to save money. I mean, I don't want to spend money on games I don't want, but the biggest goal is to get my unplayed games down. I've already spent the money anyway, not deleting the game doesn't save me anything.
Anyway, at the moment, I own 225 games and I've completed 109 or 48% of them. I have 10 in progress, 34 I've played to some extent and 72 I've never played at all. I'm so close to halfway!
