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

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.

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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