Forums > Contributor Zone > RotW: Jan. 10-16 -- Where I question my own gaming decisions while judging yours.

It's a new year. I'm still doing this. Yay.

I'm also watching movies, too, still. Dark Tower (the late 80s haunted building one, not the Stephen King one) was mediocre. Had good parts (the first act, the ending) but really dragged around the middle. Dead & Buried was a really interesting take on living dead and mad scientist stuff that I enjoyed. Bloody New Year was a pretty fun movie that I liked more when it was a more ghost story than I did when it turned into an Evil Dead inspired sort of thing. Silent Night Bloody Night was a fairly enjoyable early 70s mystery/slasher. Kind of a precursor to slashers that had a few elements of the Giallo.

I also play a lot of stuff. Rule 1 for the future: Don't try to play two Souls-like games at the same time, especially when they have different control schemes. Had been playing Nioh and then started Darksiders 3, only to find out that the series went from more Zelda-like stuff to kind of a Souls-lite style. Eventually decided that since Darksiders 3 is the shorter game, I'd just finish it before going back to Nioh because the control differences were screwing me up in both games.

Rule 2: Don't waste time with buggy stuff -- at least buggy stuff that I didn't specifically spend money on. Abandoned Saints Row 2 via PS Now due to it crashing a bit too much for my tastes and having a couple main plot quest runs ended by glitches. Very annoying.

Rule 3: The hell with the stuff I'm playing, I'm to a degree back on the Doom .wad train. Made it a good chunk of the way through Memento Mori and plan to do the second Memento Mori and Requiem, as well as probably Alien Vendetta and Eternal (not to be confused with the modern Doom Eternal -- this is a Doom 2 replacement wad focusing on larger and more complex levels with lots of switches and puzzles).

Well, that covers the important bits. Let's see…four reviews by three people makes this a pretty easy thing to do this week, assuming I don't spend too much time having to ponder placement order.

Joe's non-placer is Asguaard. It's a perfectly fine review about a potentially-good RPG with a more interesting hero than the norm. He does a good job of selling both its strengths (that character, the amount of exploration you can do) and its negatives (the rest of the story, the generic combat) and everything works out fine. One of those reviews that's hard to really point out a particular area as excellent or something that needs refined, but easy to get through and understand what's being said.

THIRD PLACE

EmP's You Will (Not) Remain (PC)

A short review for a short game. I dug your description of the game's world and its Lovecraftian version of our COVID isolation. Outside of that, this is a pretty barebones review, perhaps for a barebones game. I mean, all I know is that you are stuck in your house and have a tiny number of tasks you can do to occupy the time. The sort of thing that makes me wonder if there's more to things than that one paragraph mentions or if you just do those tasks for a while and the game ends with your suicide or transformation into a Deep One or a Mi-Go takes mercy on you and takes you to its planet. Hopefully the latter. Overall, this is a well-written review, but I wish I had more information about what I'd be expected to do when playing it. Of course, that might not be easy to do, as writing about those short games can go into heavy spoilers the second you go beyond the bare minimum basics. But, still, when I see a game given a good score and I'm reading about it and being like, "Oh, I can water a plant?", yeah, a bit more description would at least do me some good!

SECOND PLACE

Joe's Earth Atlantis (PC)

Kind of a shame you didn't overly like this one, as I really liked the art style from your screenshots. But you did give good reasoning for not overly liking it, with the repetition combined with how some of the bosses are a bit unfair. The concept of having a large non-linear world in a shooter is a cool one, but you do a good job of pointing out how the designers didn't take full advantage of the setting, making it a chore at times to get from one boss to the next. A very good review of a fairly disappointing game where you did well at describing just what made playing it a let-down.

REVIEW OF THE WEEK (aka: Overdrive Place)

dementedhut's In Sound Mind (PlayStation 5)

The one real weakness was in the first paragraph with this sentence: You, now taking control of a therapist named Desmond Wales, inexplicably finds himself in an apartment building's trash room. Could be "You, now taking…, inexplicably find yourself…" or "You now taking…who inexplicably finds himself…", but the way it is just reads wrong. After that, you did a very good review that initially confused me, thinking I'd turned the clock back to October and was actually reading a Joe review. The biggest strength of this review is how you emphasized the dream-like setting and how well it could be used at times…and how it often was discarded in favor of generic fetching and repetitive tasks, even if the game occasionally mocked the concept of those sorts of things. Kind of like Joe's second place review, this was a good example of a game that had the elements to be good, but was let down by some uninspired gameplay. This one just meshed with me a wee bit more, so it's getting hooked up with the second 100% 2022 RotW.


And now it's back to figuring out what I'm doing with my gaming life. Have all these highly-regarded games on disc and here I am, playing through decent to mediocre stuff on Now like Darksiders 3 and Rise of the Argonauts. Because they're SOOOOO much more worth my time than Ghost of Tsuchima or The Outer Worlds or Yakuza Zero or Dragon Age Inquisition or Red Dead Redemption 2 or Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night or Nier: Automata or Marvel's Spiderman or Dark Souls 3 or…ah, you get the idea. "Rob makes questionable choices; he hates himself, blah blah blah, every damn year, wash rinse repeat…"

I'm not afraid to die because I am invincible
Viva la muerte, that's my goddamn principle

Ah, thanks for pointing that out. I was attempting to transfer the narrative into the "reader's" perspective when I introduced the protagonist, but I got a little clumsy, ha. As for the game, it certainly has its moments, but quickly gives way to generic fetch and shooting segments, which becomes more prevalent the more you play into it. I was pretty much just trying to beat the game as quickly as I can during the latter half; was literally just running past enemies during the final area. Also, thanks for the RotW!

And if it'll make you feel any better, I haven't played a single game you mentioned. I'm so far behind on "current" games, that I can't even have a chat with people about games in general because most of the things I've played within the last few years are too niche.

I head spaceshit noises.

I beat the game in maybe half an hour, to give you some idea of the content. So, yes, I could have talked a bit more about what you can do, but then there'd be little left to discover. This is the poison I picked.

Props to Joe and hut for reviewing actual content their placements. Well done to OD for getting his first RotW out this year will zero nagging.

For us. For them. For you.