Eternal Threads

Eternal Threads is a game that has you fixing timelines, much like the TVA in the Loki miniseries.

My first attempt at playing I couldn't find the groove, perhaps I was too sleepy to get into the story - but then it's tough to save the life of all 6 people at once I suppose.   Once I started understanding the surface stories and making some adjustments, I found the story kind of assembling itself around me - and it was an interesting way to tell a tale.

It's frustrating at times how cryptic some of the solutions lead to others, for example - not having Linda get drunk at the party made sense and saved her life, but having her get drunk and sleep with Tom saved her *brothers* life as well.  

Okay ... It kind of left me wishing I could have at any point just submitted my best attempt instead of trying so many combinations like a lock that I knew 2 out of 3 numbers for.

Fun though in the end.

Library: Tidy Up the Arcane Library!

 This was an impulse buy after seeing someone play it online, just a simple game where some sort of tornado knocked all the books in a magical library off the shelves and you have to find the right location to put them back, acquiring skills to help you sort and organize quicker.

This is a power-wash simulator in a way, I imagined interacting with the books and library more than what the game ended up providing.

Fun?  Maybe...

Lies of P

This game has been on my TBP list for such a long time - I was happy when it finally came up in the random pick.  It's definitely souls like - so much so they maybe should pay a licensing fee.

But that's good - I like souls like, and they learned a lot - level design wasn't tedious, there were logical loop backs, quick boss runbacks.  It did suffer a bit from that "old decayed sewers" look at times but overall it was an amazing game.

There is a problem with tuning on a souls-like I think - a boss has to be a brick wall but only for an amount of time, there should be a way to learn and be better.   This game gave me the most frustrating fight that I easily spent an hour on, only to find out it was a multiphase boss battle -- and it's one of the few instances I'm ashamed to say where I've turned down the difficulty.

At that point I didn't care about doing it better - I wanted it gone.

Observer: System Redux

This game was billed as "The other Cyberpunk" - and in theme it probably is, but boy do I hate these "hunt for the hotspot" games.   You have two different modes to scan an area with (three if you include actual eyesight) and once I've hunted and not found whatever it is that I was directed to find - a game needs to give me a pass or a hint or something, otherwise I'm just .. .angry at it for not showing me?  It took about an hour.

I got angry with this game multiple times, wandering the same rooms looking for a little blob of something that at this point as a detective I would have given up on.

Might be a great story.  I'll never have the patience to know.

High on Life

 High on Life is a shooter that had Justin Roiland as producer and voiceover actor - where your sentient guns help you combat the evil menace that has come to earth in order stop the G3 Clan from turning humans into space narcotics.

It's goofy, your weapons have great personality - and one of them (unsurprisingly) sounds exactly like Morty.  The entire time you're bounty hunting, your companion is making quips and chatting it up with your targets in very "Rick & Morty" fashion.  For example, one boss exchange simply started out -- "Wait, you have drills for hands -- how do you wipe your ass?  Oh god .. do you now wipe your ass?"

The cut scenes were VERY long, way too long in fact - but I would have kept playing if there were more bounties to hunt, because the conversation was A-tier.

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

This was the first Uncharted game that I played, which is very similar to Tomb Raider but it the story of Nathan Drake, a treasure hunter trying to be retired when his brother he thought dead comes to find him for that one last score.

It's a story we've seen many times, but this was done fairly well - the character rendering, the voice acting was exceptional - the navigation and parkour was "okay" - the combat/stealth was terrible.

The game was 120GB+, mainly because of the quantity of rendered scenes included in the game - each mission was about 30 minutes long, with 10-15 easily being story scenes.

It was good.  I mean ... no sense in a replay, the game sequences were mainly figuring out the puzzle of how to trigger the next cut scene and enjoying the movie.

Eternal Afternoon

 Eternal Afternoon is an indie game where you spend the last 20 minutes of your life doing something before a giant wave comes and destroys all of creation.   

There are plenty of missions and things to accomplish in these last 20 minutes, from writing a love letter to a girl you were too nervous to talk to, finding your lost dad, playing a video game within the video game - and many collectables/achievements.

The game is a long dialog about loss and the end as you encounter various people in your neighborhood, and eventually embrace the inevitable - however the developer added a number of in-game glitches where you can "Kobayashi" the game (the mission Kirk cheated to win IIRC) and escape in some fashion ala Stanley Parable in some cases.

A great idea and well executed.