I was going to do this two months ago and then didn't.

I'm probably missing some filler, but I'm just going to have to find some way to live with that.

Akane the Kunoichi

I beat this back in the XBox Indie days without much hassle, but now my wrist is made of soggy paper straws and my twitch reflexes are shot, so it’s a real grind. Curse you, constant march of time!

Cayne

Cayne's a fun time. A little three or so hour game sandwiched in between the two main STATUS games for people who want a little more space sci fi horror. You play a pregnant woman who wakes up on a space craft filled with horrific mad experiments and balances out trying to figure out what they had in store for her with getting the hell out alive. Also, free.

Depths of Horror: Mushroom Day

Fine for what it is, but nothing really noteworthy; it was one of those games that gets discounted down to free for a few days that we all pick up and never play. I gave this a go, and it's a basic spooky cave delve. It's functional and not awful and its very first jump scare is pretty clever.

The Expanse (A Telltale Series)

This is such a waste of potential. It's a by the numbers game working off the Telltale engine blueprint which was showing its age decades ago, built around a poorly written story by people with no evident understanding or particular interest in the source material. It's worse than bad, it's dull.

Giraffe Town

Joe got me this ages ago and I played it for a few hours back when. I kind of loved the goofy surrealist off-humour that wants to be purposefully overwritten Silent Hill played with animal mascots. I was always going to go back some day, and that day is now! It’s also a bit of a rage bait game with sections with very unfair difficulty spikes.

I’m Oh, So Busy: A Week with Yoshimi

A short visual novel I thought might go somewhere interesting, but doesn’t. I thought it was going to be a look at the death of a young girl’s naivety, but it’s more or less just an inner monologue simulator. Every character but the main one is voiced, and all she gets is a bunch of “Yeah!” “Ah!” “Oh no!” little voice clips at the end of every text block which doesn’t sound like the most annoying thing I have ever come across but 100% is.

Neverhood

A ridiculously creative game, made entirely with stop motion and clay. Mechanically, it has issues like long stretches of backtracking, and some tedious treks through long environments with little payoff, But I don't care. It’s great, a real labour of love that comes through in every movement that only exists because someone somewhere put hours of effort in. You'll bever play this game, nameless reader, and I think less of you for it.

One Piece Odyssey

Had kind of a villain-of-the-week motif going on, which was never particularly engaging. The idea here is the ridiculous overpowered crew of popular anime pirates get heavily nerfed and have to use a strange power to revisit their strongest memories in order to recover their strength. But while it promises well loved story arcs like Water 7 and Dressrosa re-examined in a new light, nothing is significantly different. They care about the canon enough to make excuses for the changes that do happen (Pell can't be in the climax for Alabasta; he's in another castle) but it does feel like old media for the most part.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Will Never Die

A point and click game about an anthropomorphic rock band well past their glory days, trying to find that one last bit of relevance and how it all goes wrong. It's kind of fun because it makes no bones about the fact that the cast are all slightly different shades of stupid so their awful decisions and inability to deal with the aftermath never feel particularly forced. A fun time, but not a must play.

Simularcra

An adventure game entirely through someone’s phone. You receive said phone and soon discover its owner is in all kinds of shit, so have to use it as best you can to figure out what happened to them and if you can save them. It’s a lot cleverer with this hook than I thought it would be, and I ended up having a great time, trolling contacts, ruining dating profiles and trying to save a girl’s life when I found the time.

Sonic DX

Because muscle memory won’t let me go. Obviously, I beat the hell out of this back in the ‘Cast days, but I’ve gone back through the 16 bit offerings and have found no secure way to suffer through Sonic ‘06 on PC yet (I did not look super hard) so I play a few levels of this in between bigger games. I’m on the awful Knuckles stages right now, so I’ve slowed down a lot. But Big the Cat fishing stages are coming! Also, the clunky rail shooter robot. Urgh.

South Park: Stick of Truth

A real tribute to the early seasons of South Park with all the references you though you'd forgotten until the Crab People song starts randomly playing, and you find yourself on a quest to find the Sparrow Prince. That was great, and that it's a well constructed parody on high fantasy and genuinely funny is a hard bonus too. Better still - unlike with many parody games, it remembers to be a good game by itself first, so you still have a solid RPG experience at the forefront. One that just makes farts a large part of your arsenal.

Stasis

Statis is a sick little puppy. A sci-fi isometric horror game, it has you wake up in a huge space ship, a million miles away from anyone else, then shows you the ship is full of corpses, monsters and a South African guy who really dislikes you. That alone makes for a great start, but it also has you collect achievements based around the goriest ways you can either get yourself killed, or kill yourself with inventory items. It shows it has a decent idea of its target audience.

Utawarerumono: Past and Present Rediscovered

Aquaplus have said they're finished with the series after this one, but I've heard it all before. They'll be back in a decade or so to bully me into spending money I don't have... In a lot of ways, it's an upgraded version of Monochrome Mobius, the game release before it. It has the same world map, the same random enemies and purposefully feels like it's just dropped you back into that game with a few quality of like improvements. The best one is that it assumes you've already explore much of this world so, while it does give you previously visited locations to return to, it's made navigating the random battles a hell of a lot easier, making then curiosity visits rather than frustrating grinds.

Witcher 2

If Witcher 1 was a stereotypical PC-only RPG, then the second game makes clear it's being pushed towards consoles. This mainly means things like crafting is streamlined right back and combat gets a heavy rework. I was okay with the streamlining - it probably saved me hours - but the new combat never gelled with me. You either spend ages trying to lure bad pathfinding AI into magic traps, or you cross your fingers and see if your combat roll is going to have any worth as an evade at all. I only learnt long after I could have made an anchor save that the game splits into two very different paths considering a choice made at the end of the first act, so a replay might be in my future. Meaning when I finally get around to 3, I will already be dust.

Yakuza 6

Probably the shortest of the Yakuza games I've played through (and with 6 done, I've made my way through all the main games). Some of this was because, while it does have its own underworld conspiracy soap drama going on, it feels like a very abbreviated game missing a lot of expected features and the combat has been stripped right down to bare bones. That said, I would consider it near enough impossible to make a bad Yakuza game (though the 3 remake might be proving me wrong) and this was still a blast.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon

I went back to back Yakuzas like a fool, but 2026 has already been my JRPG return, so I figured I might as well keep the ball rolling. It's old news, but Yakuza and turn based battles work together a hell of a lot better than you would think. Honours the main character's undying love of Dragon Quest by having at least two parts of the game where you have to stop what you're doing and grind really hard for a while.

Someone can come along and drop a pick for a review I'll probably follow through on as I have until now. That person will also likely be bloody Rob, who mainly still hangs around in the hope of me dropping one of these so he can continue to kick me while I'm down.

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Feedback
	honestgamer - August 12, 2026 (06:49 PM) I still haven't played through Yakuza: Like a Dragon, though I hope to at some point. I played through Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and loved it (and reviewed it elsewhere). So, I wouldn't complain too bitterly if you chose to review Yakuza: Like a Dragon here...
	Cavalary - August 18, 2026 (10:07 AM) The fact that it splits was the big thing about Witcher 2, seems hard to not be aware of it unless you specifically wanted to play blind... Which I guess is possible at this point, if you didn't check any info back around release date, but at the time you couldn't miss it. Anyway, after initially just starting it in 2015, after finishing the first one, just to make sure that it imported the save (needed to skip the arena intro to also import that small amount of gold apparently), but it was basically unplayable on the computer I had then and the one I got that year was actually weaker, and I kept it until late 2024, so it was only last year that I returned to it, of in fact actually started it properly. And I played right until the choice and then stopped. I mean, I don't replay games, so I needed to choose "right" and... From a RP perspective, definitely Iorveth, not for him, as he's an ass, and downright terrorist, but Geralt would always choose the nonhuman cause. So will go with that, even if I punched him, so I gather he'll be pissed with me all along, but the choice remains possible, it's just clear that it's for the cause and despite the person. And there's also the fact that apparently you get far less information by choosing Roche while with Iorveth you get the real story (so for those meaning to replay, it should be Roche first). But, in "good" Witcher fashion, it's always choosing between bad outcomes, either way you go about it. Which really sucks. So I wonder when I'll persuade myself to continue.
	overdrive - August 21, 2026 (08:59 AM) Well, if I'm the one picking, I'd be going with Witcher 2, as that's the one on the list I've played (have Like a Dragon in my Backlog of Infinite Pain), but haven't gotten to it yet). Thing I thought was weirdest about that game was its difficulty curve, where it starts out brutal and gets pretty easy by the end. At least for me, I know I had far more trouble with things like this prologue battle with about three guys in a fairly confined courtyard-like place really early on and those side quest fights in the first chapter with the queens of that weird insect species in the woods than I did with pretty much anything in the second and third chapters.
	EmP - August 23, 2026 (04:44 AM) I can't say I loved Witcher 2. Maybe at some point I know about the hard path split, but I've played it so long after it was relevance, I'd long forgotten and, unless I missed something big, the game didn't mention that I was making that big a choice at the time. I figured I was going to chat with Iorveth and then Roche. I don't know, maybe it was me. I'll maybe replay it again, but I already had to play a small chunk of it and then scrap and restart when I figured my Witcher 1 save data didn't carry over so went back to fix that. Tempting to just accept it as it is an finally move on to 3. I agree with the combat curve - to start with, I relayed heavily on traps and the like to scrape win. By endgame, I could mindless slash my way to victory. Never hugely enjoyed either method. Like A Dragon was a lot of fun and a 90 hour sink. Infinite Wealth is supposed to be around double to size, so I guess that's something to look forward to. Next year's Yakuza game will be Gaiden, though. There is an order to these thing. Just finished Dredge, a Lovecraftion fishing simulator, and Pillars of the Earth, an excellent narrative game based on an excellent book series. Next, God help me, is probably Detroit: Become Human.
	honestgamer - August 28, 2026 (10:13 PM) I put something like 150 hours into Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and loved nearly every minute of it. There was still some stuff I hadn't gotten around to finishing by the time I turned my attention elsewhere, so that estimate you heard sounds about right.
	hastypixels - September 03, 2026 (08:59 AM) Speaking of muscle memory not letting you go, I breezed my way through the Half Life 2 trifecta, once again, for the umpteeth time. I do it about once a year, though a little less now. My reflexes aren't what they used to be, but I find I'm more clever in situations, so that pretty much makes up the difference. I finally figured out how to wait for that darned elevator without dying a dozen times and getting all freaked out.