At one point I had my whole gaming plan for the year laid out… I ordered Unknown 9: Awakenings on the Xbox because I would be spending much of September and October working my way through Star Wars: Outlaws on the PS5… then the end of October onwards would be clearing through Dragon Age: The Veilguard, following which my insane Crazy Christmas plan would cover me the rest of the year.

Then I ruined it all.

Firstly, I bought the physical edition of Balatro, which has me hooked… and secondly… I actually started to play Star Wars: Outlaws and thought it was… well… crap.

A few hours saw me into the second planet, and a couple more saw me able to leave there… and that was that, no desire to go any further, no will to see myself punished for messing up another stealth section… no urge to chase down bounties… so I sold it on Ebay.

Feeling guilty that a huge chunk of PS5 gaming wasn’t going to happen, I invested some of the sale proceeds (a week of so before they were credited to my account) on DarQ, a game I could only physically see on sale at one store, and cheaper than copes were selling for on Ebay.

The YouTube guide sits at around 58 minutes for the main game and the DLCs, the physical copy includes all of them in one bundle and offers up a Platinum Trophy… a nice little palette cleanser before Unknown 9 lands me thinks…

Main Game

It’s a side scrolling platform puzzler similar to Inside or Limbo, but with a perspective trick… you can walk on walls, turn walls around, to allow you to access parts of the current level that look out of reach.

Whilst this is all vertical at the start, further levels have you switching the access 90 degrees so you’re walking down different streets, and another has you jumping in and out of the screen via switches… the puzzles are nicely worked out, and there are timing elements to take into account, so you may need to set something up, quickly switch the perspective, and then race to grab an object before it disappears.

On 2 of the first 4 levels I’ve encountered a scared child who has run off, and there are other “beings” that you have to be careful not to get spotted by else it’s all over.

Having cleared the first 4 chapters I’m only around 15 minutes into the walkthrough video… chapter 5 looks like it’s something more substantial to dig my teeth into.

Chapter 6 is a much bigger thing to undertake, even with a guide helping me along the way it seems to take forever, and this is where the unresponsive controls really start to hit home… you really have to push the stick left or right really hard to have your character running.

As I hit the final Chapter, with no collectables or any puzzles, just a memory test for when and where the landscape changes as you’re chased by the creature in a wheelchair… and the terrible controls lead to me being killed at the final stage several times as I attempt to run to the left for a sustained period of time.

DLC

Having forgotten just how bad the controls are, I jump into the first of 2 DLCs a couple of weeks later… and even though I need to complete both of these for the Platinum Trophy… I can’t put myself through it… I play for maybe 15 minutes, 15 minutes of walking because for some reason running seems even harder here… and I call it quits… life is too short for this.

Rating

Had the game continued in the same vein as the opening few chapters this would have scored way higher… but the difficulty in running anywhere drag it down… how did they not notice how hard it is when using a controller to run? Before I started knocking points off for this the game was in the high 60’s score wise, but it smacks of a lack of polish that this issue wasn’t noticed, it hampers the gameplay and makes it more difficult than it should be… getting killed when all you’re doing is moving left is not a player skill issue, it’s a major control issue that should have been sorted before release.

In the end it lands at a 53 which is in the 3^rd worst game I’ve played for Indie Fest… and it goes to show how one “small” issue, which should have been fixed before launch, can hold a game back.

At one point I had my whole gaming plan for the year laid out… I ordered Unknown 9: Awakenings on the Xbox because I would be spending much of September and October working my way through Star Wars: Outlaws on the PS5… then the end of October onwards would be clearing through Dragon Age: The Veilguard, following which my insane Crazy Christmas plan would cover me the rest of the year.

Then I ruined it all.

Firstly, I bought the physical edition of Balatro, which has me hooked… and secondly… I actually started to play Star Wars: Outlaws and thought it was… well… crap.

A few hours saw me into the second planet, and a couple more saw me able to leave there… and that was that, no desire to go any further, no will to see myself punished for messing up another stealth section… no urge to chase down bounties… so I sold it on Ebay.

Feeling guilty that a huge chunk of PS5 gaming wasn’t going to happen, I invested some of the sale proceeds (a week of so before they were credited to my account) on DarQ, a game I could only physically see on sale at one store, and cheaper than copes were selling for on Ebay.

The YouTube guide sits at around 58 minutes for the main game and the DLCs, the physical copy includes all of them in one bundle and offers up a Platinum Trophy… a nice little palette cleanser before Unknown 9 lands me thinks…

Main Game

It’s a side scrolling platform puzzler similar to Inside or Limbo, but with a perspective trick… you can walk on walls, turn walls around, to allow you to access parts of the current level that look out of reach.

Whilst this is all vertical at the start, further levels have you switching the access 90 degrees so you’re walking down different streets, and another has you jumping in and out of the screen via switches… the puzzles are nicely worked out, and there are timing elements to take into account, so you may need to set something up, quickly switch the perspective, and then race to grab an object before it disappears.

On 2 of the first 4 levels I’ve encountered a scared child who has run off, and there are other “beings” that you have to be careful not to get spotted by else it’s all over.

Having cleared the first 4 chapters I’m only around 15 minutes into the walkthrough video… chapter 5 looks like it’s something more substantial to dig my teeth into.

Chapter 6 is a much bigger thing to undertake, even with a guide helping me along the way it seems to take forever, and this is where the unresponsive controls really start to hit home… you really have to push the stick left or right really hard to have your character running.

As I hit the final Chapter, with no collectables or any puzzles, just a memory test for when and where the landscape changes as you’re chased by the creature in a wheelchair… and the terrible controls lead to me being killed at the final stage several times as I attempt to run to the left for a sustained period of time.

DLC

Having forgotten just how bad the controls are, I jump into the first of 2 DLCs a couple of weeks later… and even though I need to complete both of these for the Platinum Trophy… I can’t put myself through it… I play for maybe 15 minutes, 15 minutes of walking because for some reason running seems even harder here… and I call it quits… life is too short for this.

Rating

Had the game continued in the same vein as the opening few chapters this would have scored way higher… but the difficulty in running anywhere drag it down… how did they not notice how hard it is when using a controller to run? Before I started knocking points off for this the game was in the high 60’s score wise, but it smacks of a lack of polish that this issue wasn’t noticed, it hampers the gameplay and makes it more difficult than it should be… getting killed when all you’re doing is moving left is not a player skill issue, it’s a major control issue that should have been sorted before release.

In the end it lands at a 53 which is in the 3^rd worst game I’ve played for Indie Fest… and it goes to show how one “small” issue, which should have been fixed before launch, can hold a game back.

Starfield is a game that has… issues.

The first of which is that by using space travel in the way they have it’s practically impossible to stumble over a mission through exploration the same way you can in Skyrim or Fallout, often as I travelled to the next town to continue my current mission I’d get distracted by a new Cave system or set of ruins, and whilst there find myself becoming totally side tracked and, before you know it, miles away from where I was headed before doing something totally different.

Another is that XP doesn’t scale with your level, so when I reloaded the game for the DLC, I found myself completing what is a fairly sizeable mission, Lair of the Mantis, and was rewarded with a paltry 200 XP for completion… point a, I’m at the point where I need 9,000 or so to Level up, and point b, I’d got more than that for clearing out a room of pirates leading up to the end of the mission.

I’m currently at level 69 (nice) and the prospect of grinding out another 30 Levels is not appealing… so hopefully the DLC fixes that a little.

What it can’t fix is that I’ve not played for so long, I needed to keep referring to the settings to find out what button does what action, I’d forgotten how to access my inventory, how to save, use my powers, even change the camera position (which still, annoyingly, defaults to too damn close behind your character) let alone anything complicated like throwing a grenade.

Once I managed to control my character a little better, I was off to find the DLC and my first issue… I couldn’t line my ship up with the Space Station I was trying to dock with… and when I did, I forgot how to dock because the prompt just wasn’t appearing.

Having managed that I called time for the evening… having achieved very little, aside from actually not playing Balatro for an hour.

October 6^th

I finished the DLC last night, at least as far as I’m prepared to go into it… the main story has been completed, along with a handful of side missions that were needed to unlock another Achievement, and I wandered around the landscape enough to discover the 50 locations needed for another.

While the landscape is okay, and the locations such as The Citadel are well polished… the lack of variety in missions really struck home.

One side mission, The Scientific Method, drags out far too long with a dull fetch quest mechanic repeated three times (collect tissues samples from dead creatures, samples from mutated plants and data from faulty equipment) and then an all-out attack on a pirate base.

Too many missions have you deciding someone’s fate… it’s very, very repetitive and this counters the good points… because there are a couple.

What really helps here is that everything takes place on one planet, so you’re not pulled out of the action every 10-15 minutes to fast travel to the next planet for the next part of the mission, before being forced to travel back to do the next part or report to the quest giver.

So, the map looks busy… there are locations to discover, and it’s possible to discover locations on your way somewhere else… I’d often open the map up and see the icon for a building or facility near me that I had yet to visit, so I’d go off there and see what there was… something I never did in the main game because, all too often, they were cookie cutter buildings I’d seen a dozen times before.

I can’t tell you what the Rover feels like to use as I never tried it, and wasn’t even sure I had the option to having gone straight there from the Mantis mission in the Razorleaf Mantis ship, you may need to add the vehicle to an existing vehicle… so I was still travelling the planet on foot… and, mostly, enjoyed it.

New wildlife to examine, some to kill for more XP on a single creature than you get for completing some of the missions therein.

Story wise… it’s formulaic, and that’s where it falls down… too many repetitive missions, too many badly disguised fetch quests and a boss battle at the end that makes little sense… you arrive and discover that you are the only person who can hear the words of the Speaker, who is now an entity seemingly of pure energy… after an experiment goes awry locals are regressing into Vortex creatures… pure white and able to teleport around.

The Speaker is one of these, so appears all white and glowing… while the others who have fallen to the Vortex become super violent, the Speaker is still in control of his mind and asks for help.

What happens next is that you have to get the help of the 3 main families of Va’ruun, so 3 separate missions to get them to co-operate, once done the assault of the Citadel to end the main plot… all fine, quite fun and I was even able to level up to 75 from 69 which happened way faster than I’d managed to get from 65 to 69 before.

I could start ranting about how if I’d paid for whack for this I’d be upset… but aside from the 10% discount for being a Gamepass Ultimate subscriber, I did pay full whack for this… and I ought to feel upset, it’s not a lot of content for what you’ve paid, and when you consider that the 2 DLCs for The Witcher 3 were, a) much better than this, and b) cheaper… there would be grounds to complain.

I’d certainly think about purchasing any future content for the game at full price (or even the discounted price) if they do any more.

What Bethesda have is a good starting position to improve the franchise… I doubt very much that the first Elder Scrolls game was considered perfect… and they have learnt some (but by no means not all) the lessons that could be gleaned for this new IP release… but we’ll probably have to wait close to 15 years for any sequel.

My time killer game has been, for the last 15-18 months at least, Vampire Survivors… if I have an hour to kill then I’d load up the game and do a money harvest run with Sammie the Caterpillar in readiness for the next update or DLC where I’d be obliged to buy new characters unlocked within the game itself.

Playing through the whole of Vampire Survivors again on the PS5, in the space of just 8 or 9 days has left me wanting a bit of a break from all that… overkill is the word that springs to mind.

What to replace it with though was the question… and after hearing it praised for several months and listening to talk of its addictive qualities… plus being lured by a physical special edition… I bought Balatro.

It came with 10 physical cards, 5 Jokers and 5 Aces, most of which I have since unlocked in the game… but, is it going to be the new time killer?

Yes… yes… it is.

I’m still learning my way through, doggedly stuck to the first, most basic, deck for much of the first 2 or 3 hours, only experimenting with other decks later on, which is where the time killer status became clear… even though it was the middle of the week and I have a 6.30am alarm set for work, I was still playing as it approached 1am.

It’s not a quick game… completion estimates on TrueAchievements are at the 200-300 hour mark, and some of the Achievements look totally out of reach, scoring 100,000,000 chips in a single hand… most I’ve hit so far is around 17,500 and as for completing a whole 8 level run in less than 12 hands, I struggle to beat 1 level with 12 hands at the moment… I clearly have a long way to go.

Yet, what I’ve played so far is fun, learning which Joker cards are best at what part of the game, discovering that the order in which they are laid out on the top shelf display to maximise their impact on the final score of the hand… it’s all good, this is going to keep me entertained for months.

To the point where, even having bought it physically, I’m tempted to buy it digitally to make playing on multiple machines easier rather than taking the disk from one machine to the other if I change consoles.

September 19^th

More play… I’ve sank around 11 hours into this in the 3 evenings since it arrived… and I’ve managed to complete a full run of all 8 ante levels, a total of 24 rounds of cards… but it did make something very obvious stand out.

Basically, that you’re run is at the mercy of the random number generator that decides what cards you’ll be offered after each round… if you strike it lucky and get a good combination of Jokers being offered to you, then you can smash through rounds in one hand.

In this particular run I got very lucky… first Joker counted how many times I’d played a hand before in the run and multiplied my score by that number, so the more I played certain hands the better they’d score… I was also able to level up the 4 or 5 hands I played the most with Planet cards, which upgrade the base score and multiplier for those.

I also picked up a Joker which added a X3 multiplier to the score for each Joker in my hand, having 5 Jokers in play meant this a X15 adjustment.

Then we’ll add in 2 Holographic Jokers, which add 10 to the multiplier before they even get to their upgrades, both of these were adding scores and multipliers to each hand, and the final Joker I had (and moved to the right-hand side to be acted on last) took the whole multiplier level of the hand and trebled it… I was ending up with multipliers of 180+ for even a basic hand.

Add in that during the run I was able to add a lot of special cards to my deck which themselves upped the multiplier and score of the cards themselves and I was able to increase my highest hand score to over 90,000

Yet another run, using the same base card set barely made it to the second ante level as the Joker’s I was being offered were nowhere near as useful.

And that’s what lets the game down a little… too much reliance on Luck.

September 24^th

Scarily I’m almost 30 hours deep into this already… and have completed 3 runs… a whole 3 runs.

So… having lamented the random selection of Joker’s that are offered to you, the boss at the end of each round is also seemingly random… and that leads to another problem, just as bad as the random nature of the Jokers.

The wrong Boss at the wrong time can kill your run instantly.

Having completed a run using the Magic Deck (thanks to getting a good selection of Jokers very early on) I opted, as I have done previously, to continue for further rounds… and the first boss I got was one which doubles the amount of chips you need to progress… my setup was capable of knocking out a 5-hand score of around 300,000 and yet I was tasked with scoring 560,000 at the end of the 9^th round.

I’d managed to complete the run thanks to luck… my first Joker added 5 chips permanently to each card once it’s used… so you’d get 10 for a King, plus 5 for the Joker and the next time you played that card it would score 15.

Add in another Joker that triggers the first card played 2 additional times and soon enough I had some picture cards that would score 90+ basic, other Jokers were a +10 Multiplier for any hand containing 2 pairs, another adding a +15 Multiplier for holding 5 Jokers, enhanced by being a holographic card so another +10 Multiplier and the final Joker giving me a 25% chance of increasing the level of the hand played, also a Holographic card and I was getting very high chip scores of 500+ multiplied by close to 100 each time and a base score was around 50,000 a time.

I was just waiting for one final Joker to be offered to send that total into the stratosphere and the dodgy boss got me before I could push on even further.

September 30^th

Things have moved on a pace… I’ve now completed runs with the 5 base coloured decks, the 5 decks that are unlocked from those, and a run on a higher difficulty setting.

I’ve learnt to recognise early on if a run has a chance of victory or if I’m wasting time and going through the motions… and had a glorious run on the hardest of the 5 base decks where I was smashing scores of 120,000+ with a magical collection of Jokers.

Challenge mode has been unlocked and the first of those completed… yet, like normal runs, these are still very much at the mercy of the random Joker selection… in the completed run, quite by chance I landed the Joker which adds a multiplier to your hand based on the value of your other Jokers… with 4 eggs (Jokers which increase $3 in value for every completed round) on board my base multiplier was increasing by 12 every round completed.

My first higher level run was done using the Chequered Deck, 26 Spades, 26 Hearts and no Clubs or Diamonds… if you get the right Joker to increase the hand size, giving you 9 cards to select from, then you’ll have a flush every hand… get the Joker to increase the multiplier by the number of times you’ve played a hand that that soon goes through the roof… upgrade the base value of the flush as often as you can and you can hit some serious scores.

I’m now 56 hours in, with just over half the Achievements unlocked… but I know the remaining half could take me years to unlock… and I’m fine with that, it won’t be my main game again for a while, but as a time killer it’s perfect.

October 10^th

I felt I’d written enough at that point before I posted the piece up… then I discovered the Skip Level mechanic and it changed everything.

As you choose your next round, whether it be Small, Big or Boss, you can skip both the Small and Big rounds for a bonus… maybe a chunk of cash, a second Voucher in the store, a card pack… or a Polychrome Joker for free… and, oddly, by playing less rounds the game can be made easier.

Polychrome Jokers, by the way, will multiply your total multiplier by 1.5, so 100 becomes 150, 200 becomes 300 and so on, multiple instances of these can send your overall score for a hand through the roof.

Using the Skip Level feature I managed to complete a found run, which had previously consisted of 24 rounds, in just 11 rounds, scoring massive amounts in the process.

Collect a couple of double tags from skipping rounds, and then skipping to pick up a negative Joker means you can massively increase the number of Jokers a player can hold in their hand at any one time, and I’ve seen evidence of this where a player had 17 at once… the normal Joker limit being just 5.

And then I started the Challenge mode where you need to complete a run with a strict set of conditions imposed, such as some Jokers being permanently in your hand, a lack of picture cards, having a Stone card forced on you at the start of every round… lots of fun, I’ve been hammering some of these as my time played whooshes past 100 hours… for the price of the game via download, just £11.49 in the UK, this is a bargain.

Here’s the rub… I quite like Star Wars titles… but not ones where you play as one of the main characters from the films… they carry too much baggage for me, they’re well known… I want to play as someone who was around at the time but not known by half the population of the planet.

As such the stories told by the Knights of the Old Republic titles, and the Star Wars: Jedi games are perfect.

While playing as a Jedi is fun, here we have a game that (hopefully) avoids all that… and its time to start playing…

September 9th

Far play on the accessibility settings being the first thing you have to interact with, more developers need to be doing this… but, there’s no setting (at least that I can find) which changes the sensitivity of the right thumb stick for moving the camera around… I check everywhere, but when I move the camera it moves in great whooping sweeps way too fast and way too far.

I don’t play much, just to the point where I get off the first planet and crash land on the second… a podcast I listen to the next morning advises to mainline the main plot for this second location, in order to open the world up and get access to everything you’ll need to properly explore.

A couple of gripes… both the lockpicking and the computer hacking don’t seem to be explained at all… there is the option to press L2 to get “Help” but that doesn’t seem to do anything… for both I have to go to YouTube for an explanation of how they work.

Lockpicking is a rhythm affair, the lock will repeat a 3 click pattern which you have to replicate using the right trigger… 2 lights on the right also show this pattern, which Is handy as there is one position in the game where the lock is showing this pattern, but you can’t see it as it’s obscured by your lockpicking device.

Computer hacking is a Mastermind sort of affair, 8 possible icons can be selected for 3 different positions, you guess three and they change colour to indicate if they are a correct icon in the right position, or correct but in the wrong position and you have a set number of chances to get it right before the alarm goes off.

Even changing the lockpicking to the easiest setting with assistance it can still be frustrating to attempt, added to the over sensitive right stick and thoughts of giving up during the tutorial area (which is what the whole section leading up to leaving the planet is) before I unlocked any Trophies… again the podcast I listened too the next day does mention the slow, cumbersome, start… I’m not usually a fan of games which take X number of hours to get good… but I’ll stick with this one a little longer.

September 23rd

Yeah… weeks later and not once have I felt the urge to reload the game and get back to it… there is a decent game in there, but not one that I want to play.

I’m not a fan of stealth games as a rule, and while I appreciate that you’re playing a thief here so creeping around is something you ought to expect, the punishment for failing is way, way too hard… and the camera and player control issue kick in big time when you’re trying to creep around.

The premise looked great, a Han Solo type character taking on jobs for different syndicates whilst earning yourself a reputation in the system was one I was really looking forward to, and as a Star Wars fan (although not to the same level as the obsessives) it sounded perfect… but it’s not, and I’m capable of admitting that rather than try and struggle through the rest of the game.

So, I’ve decided to try and cash in while the game is still relatively new… it dropped on Ebay, with the Steel Book also on there as a separate item.

In hindsight (which is always 20/20 vision) this is one where I should have waited for the reviews before I jumped in, as I’m planning to do with the forthcoming Dragon Age title, fingers crossed now the other game I’ve ordered in advance, Unknown 9 Awakenings, isn’t another disappointment.

The plan was/is to try and smash 100,000 Gamerscore over Christmas… which will inevitably involve playing an incredible amount of shovelware, and thus the process of accumulating said shovelware has began.

At present there are 16 titles in the mix, which have cost me just over £35 and which offer 67,000 Gamerscore should I complete the lot… as follows;

Kick It Bunny – 5,000

The one I’m really not looking forward to, potentially the biggest time sink of the lot, but I already had it in my library and it recently got updated to add the final 1,000 to max out it’s scoring potential.

Reactor X – 5,000

I have already played the imaginatively titles sequel, Reactor X 2, and at least one update… should be one of the easier titles in this list.

Blind Postman – 5,000

Potential failure of the full amount here, a few of the Achievements require levels to be completed inside what looks to be a strict time limit… think those particular Achievements will be left till the end when I get to this one.

Super Ninja Miner – 5,000

Bought in a doubt pack with Perfect Ninja Painter for £6.69 so 2 very similar games for the price of 1 and a bit… the two games look like they play in very similar fashion, just changing the objectives.

Perfect Ninja Painter – 4,000

£6.69 for what could turn out to be 9,000 points was too good a chance to miss.

50 Years – 5,000

From what I’ve seen the final update may take a bit of time as you work towards a variety of endings from a set point… hopefully a little save manipulation will sort that out.

Happi Basudei – 4,000

Looks simple enough, was cheap enough, and doesn’t appear to be a hateful, colour saturated, pixel art style platformer… oh hang on… my bad… doesn’t look too taxing.

Robolifter – 3,000

I’m not dropping below 3,000 for a game, and there’s always the outside chance this may increase with an update between now and December… there are a couple of games like this in the list, pushing blocks around and such like, hopefully not too many.

Sissa’s Path – 5,000

And here’s another, a suspiciously square looking cat moving balls of yarn around onto pressure pads.

Foxes Need To Eat – 4,000

This is one I’m not really looking forward to, a platform puzzler with an element of skill needed to work through some of the puzzles.

Colorful Colore – 4,000

Is it bad that I’ve had to go back to the Internet to work out what some of these games are because I’ve already forgotten what it was that made me accept a game into the list (and the pixel art, side scrolling platformers have all been skipped over) other than the points… paint the walls the correct colour game… how hard can it be?

Kitten Island – 3,000

So… having typed above about ignoring side scrolling platformers… we have a side scrolling platformer… games like this are the reason I intend to have a minimum of 105,000 available as I’m bound to strike out on one.

Super Snake DX – 3,000

A vertically scrolling Snake game… only 3,000 points available… hopefully nothing too taxing.

Lab Crisis – 5,000

One of the cheaper ones, £2.09 for 5,000 points and looks simple enough.

Rayland 2 – 3,000

The Youtube guide covers all 50 Levels in under 30 minutes… just the sort of game I’m looking for… also get the Windows stack but I doubt my old laptop will be able to play it… still humming along nicely with Windows 7 installed, and too old to run anything more up to date than that.

Ballotron Oceans - 4,000

I held fire on this when I first saw the sale go up, some of the later levels looked a little overcomplicated… and then I saw the YouTube guides where even the latest update only takes 3 or 4 minutes… so another 4,000 added.

What I don’t want to do is ruin the end of the year game fest by only playing crap like this, so I intend to mix these in with something worthwhile, and right now that is a proper run at Baldur’s Gate 3, although if the new Dragon Age game is as hefty as the previous one, I could still be deep into that come Christmas.

I love Vampire Survivors… it’s a game I can load up and just lose myself in its psychedelic wonder for hours, even when there are no Achievements on offer, I’ll happily play the game if I have a spare half an hour.

There’s something very alluring about playing a game where you are over-powered wiping out hundreds and thousands of enemies… if there’s an update or new DLC even better.

My last run was a coin harvesting affair, as characters have to be bought (and some have cost me upwards of 250,000 coins) it pays to have a small stash waiting… so I loaded it up and set the scenario just for collecting coins.

Sammy the Caterpillar, Disco of Gold Arcana card selected, endless run so no appearance from Death at 30 minutes, hyper setting ticked for a faster more intense game… and 60 minutes later, I hit level 1,000 with 475,000+ kills and over 3million coins collected.

I have dabbled in the “Adventure” mode, but the issue there is you’re effectively starting over from the beginning… very few characters to select, limited map options, no power/armour/health upgrades in play… and, and this is the kicker when compared to normal runs, you have to worry about being killed by the endless hordes of enemies.

So, for me, adventure mode is not really what I want to be doing.

Now I completed the first 2 adventures recently… because they pushed out an update and they added achievements linked to these… the 3^rd adventure remains untouched.

I don’t really want to play as a weak and feeble character again… so when the game finally released on the PlayStation 4 and 5 did I really want to go through all that once more?

No… but it didn’t stop me.

The PlayStation 5 version comes with just 41 Trophies in the base game (the base game on Xbox currently shows 120 Achievements) but 22 DLC packs at launch, all free, which bring it up to the same number of Trophies as with the Xbox version… and a Platinum added in for good measure.

What this does mean is that, potentially, you’ll be working on more than a handful of different DLC packs at the same time… and while it was fun finishing a run back in the day and watching maybe 6 or 7 Achievements unlock, having experienced what someone described as “Bullet Heaven” going back and selecting a character who attacks every 3 or 4 seconds is going to be a shocker.

I’m sort of ashamed that I managed to Platinum the base game early Monday morning following a Thursday lunch time release, and that on the Friday I had to charge my PS5 controller twice as it ran out of power mid game… and that Monday was spent finishing the base game and all but the 2 large chunks of DLC and the latest update.

I currently sit at 178/221 Trophies unlocked, with 3 of those remaining being for triggering special moves with certain characters which will be easy to clean up, I’m then left with just the Moonspell and Foscari DLC packs to complete and the whole thing will be potentially cleaned up in just over a week… some way short of the 120+ hours that I’ve put into the Xbox version.

It becomes very clear while playing this that there is 1 of the new Darkana cards that breaks the game if you select it at the start… every time you level up it drops 1 or 2 items you can collect, and these can be simple bags of gold, to the candy box weapon icon which allows you to select another weapon.

At the end of 1 run, ostensibly just to survive 15 minutes with a certain character I had 12 fully evolved weapons (because you can also collect additional support items via the random level drop items), over 150,000 kills (and this was in a standard 30 minute run) and even more coins.

Consequentially, the only thing that hampered my completion of the Moonspell and Foscari DLC was that there were so many items on screen all at once, I couldn’t see my character let alone where I was supposed to be going.

Around 2am on the Friday morning the final Trophies popped… all 221 unlocked in around 8 days of play and maybe 36 hours… I may now have to play a full priced, open world, title to refresh my palette from this monumental indie title.

Here’s the thing… I rarely buy Indie games day and date… mostly because often I won’t even realise they’re out till much later… for example, Jonathon Blow complained about the sales of Braid Remastered being appallingly low (he used stronger language than that) and, while I knew it was in the works, I had no idea it had been released, because often Indie titles have very little in the way of marketing budget.

I’ll play more on Gamepass because they do at least draw attention to them coming out if they’re appearing on the service at launch.

So I played stuff like Ravenlok close to launch because of just that… Venba, Open Roads, Cocoon and others have followed suit.

Recently though I’ve paid for 2 at launch… Lifeless Moon as I was a big fan of Lifeless Planet (granted this did not end well) and then this, which was hugely helped by a large piece on the front page of the BBC News website and a glowing review on Gamespot.

Thank Goodness You’re Here cost me the full £14.99 at a time a lot of my Indie titles budget was being focused towards the “Crazy Christmas” whore-a-thon that I’m looking at… hope it’s worth the money… given it was developed by a handful of people from Yorkshire, they’ll know a lot about getting what you paid for.

August 26^th

In the spirit of adventure, I launch myself into the game having seen just a few tips at the start a walkthrough video, info such as hitting every door you see, always hitting the pub when you reach a certain area, kick every postbox… but that was it.

Thus, when I emerged into the opening area I hit everything and everybody before even attempting to work out what I needed to do… which was to help a man with his arm stuck in a drain, needs lubrication and what better than the butter shop, only it’s not open as they lost the keys and need a locksmith, only he’s in the pub having a pint, or would be but the beer is flat so the landlord needs help… and we have here the whole premise of the gameplay, help one person but to do so you have to help others and a domino effect kicks in.

It's a short game, just over 2 hours on my first run, but the humour stands out all the way through, small references in the background, a mini homage to the 4 Yorkshireman sketch from the 1960’s, everything costs 10 bob (a bob being 5p because I’m old enough to remember) and cigarettes are seen as a healthy snack.

The voice acting is in keeping with the Northern setting, the cartoon art style work wells even if the size of your character changes from scene to scene, at one time small enough to fit into a pint glass, at others big enough to smash a phone box to pieces.

By the end of the game you’ll have helped fixed the fryer at the chip shop, helped the Big Pie manufacturer cook a huge pie, helped an invalid get breakfast, caught a notorious criminal, helped a man come to terms with his big head and more… in under 2 hours.

My send run was considerably quicker as I cleaned up a handful of Trophies I missed before, one of which I felt hard done by (I needed to jump on the squashed remains on an already dead snail) as I felt I’d already done that by landing on it and squashing it, and a 3^rd for the Far Cry inspired ending (think Far Cry 4 here) left me at 3hrs 36mins for the Platinum Trophy.

Indie Fest wise a score of 74 puts it into 3^rd place overall… it could have been longer, more could have been made of the rivalry between the Big Pie maker and the owners of Tom’s Tiny Pies, traversal around the world could have been made easier, but did allow for the inclusion of 1 running joke involving a chimney… and part of me feels that the money paid was a little much for the time spent playing, but that’s on me for rushing in at release.

Worthy of a play, but maybe the very northern British humour could hold it back a little in some markets.

At the start of March 2024, I finally rolled credits on Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden.

After around 61 hours of ghost slaying, chest opening, haunting solving gameplay I’d managed to unlock 41 of the 43 Achievements, including 3 done after the credits rolled… I went back and found my last 4 items of equipment (all at the end of Voids), milked a relatively simple Nest site until I completed it 11 times in total, and replayed part of the final Void as it contained a potentially easy place to get 5 headshots with the Rifle in one combat encounter.

Looking at the Achievement list I never thought I had a sniff of the full 1,000 Gamerscore… now I’m one, bare bones, run away from completion… and this time I’m going to get my woman back.

Bare bones… the full game has 23 haunting cases, and I need to complete a minimum of 13 of these to have enough “Essence” to perform the ritual bringing Antea back from the dead… part of me still thinks this will be a “bad” ending where Antea is furious at Red for breaking his vow for purely selfish reasons… but it’s time to find out… at the same time I’m curious to see if making different decisions changes much of the story.

Will the trapper settlement fall into ruin if I kill/blame the one competent hunter there? Will Kate refuse to assist me later as a result? What effect will taking out the Blacksmith, sole Cook and Physician there as well? Will the Fort fall into madness and rebellion if I cast out the commander?

Thankfully I have a save after the first banish/blame scenario on the way to the trapper camp… so that’s maybe 6 hours I don’t have to replay… and I don’t have to work on any of the Nests, Voids, Cursed Chests again… simply work through the 4 main quest segments and then maybe another 10 hauntings and onto the final boss battle and alternate ending.

August 13^th

I’m now about halfway through the game… having killed the Beast and blamed Thickskin, I moved onto Fort Jericho where I bumped off the old boy in charge and I’m set to move onto the more, bible bashing, settlement further down the map.

Along the way I’ve blamed the fake blacksmith and taken care of the person who was preparing all the meals, and dealt with all the medical issues in the Hunter’s region… personally I’d say that settlement was pretty screwed after that, no Blacksmith, no cook, no medic and a leader who hates herself for letting the people of New Eden chain up her beloved school-mistress.

Nobody claimed that this, obviously much darker, run was going to be a cake walk.

With the old witch now in a much better place, especially considering I’m killing people left right and centre, I ought to be able to consume the minimal number of souls/spirits by the time I reach the end game and still be strong enough to get through the final battles that are ahead.

Here I am thankful that I delayed my return trip to New Eden originally to get all the collectable stuff out of the way, the time spent at Fort Jericho was much reduced, and I even left a couple of haunting cases there untouched in my rampage through the main plot.

August 21^st

Well… this I didn’t expect… as I was working on a couple of other side quests I found myself back in the Trapper camp, and thought I’d take the chance to start another haunting case… first time through a Storekeeper was worried that his friend/bodyguard, a female Indian he saved from Slavers, was missing… and you put her ghost to rest.

Now I’m playing and going through working towards bringing Antea back and I head to the same store… and the Storekeep is no more, and his Indian bodyguard is in charge having inherited the store after his death… so they’ve switched the haunted/haunter around here… I had been planning to just mainline the main quest to get the game finished quickly, but now I may take the time to seek out the other Haunting Cases I’ve been ignoring.

Sadly, it doesn’t change much of the haunting case… the story of how the Storekeep was partially (read very) responsible for her tribe being wiped out still plays out… while I lack the imagination to see how they could have played it differently, the “reason” used to blame the living person at the end was reaching a little, granted that could be said of some others, but when I was playing with the aim of ascending all the spirits there seemed more logical reasoning to blame all those people that were being haunted.

August 23^rd

Credits have rolled and Antea is back in the land of the living… the final 2 battles, the one in the final void and the 2 part final boss battle were a little harder than before as, this time, I wasn’t as highly levelled as I had been before… first time around I was fully levelled up, with Relics in all equipment slots and all powers honed and balanced… this time I was at level 20 (just) and had barely scratched the last skill tree.

I’d been hammering the main questline to reach the end, pausing only once I found the quest mentioned in the August 21^st segment… when I came across another haunting case where the roles had been reversed, again no change to the story so I made the decision to go back to the main plot missions only.

I knew I was close to the end, but when I settled down to an early morning session I was surprised to hit the final battle after 40 minutes… the ending was naturally bitter-sweet, as the narrator hints at a possible sequel plot as he talks of Red and Antea having developed a liking for the forbidden fruit.

Between them they’ve consumed a lot of human souls now, how would people who swore an oath to protect human life cope with this going forward?

It went on Ebay that weekend, while it’s a definite contender for my game of the year, I can’t see myself going back and playing through it again, and there has been no mention of any DLC, or even how they would implement it… if they knock out a sequel down the line I’ll be there… I knew when I bought it that I’d most likely enjoy my time there… I just didn’t realise how much.

I played through the Xbox version of this at launch, the back end of 2018, and it was a struggle… not because the game is bad, but because the last few months of 2018 gaming was hard, unbeknownst to me (until late November) I was seriously ill… the cough, headaches, hearing loss and severe joint pain that I was enduring were signs of something that could/would kill me if left untreated.

11-11 Memories Retold was a game I could play, it was one of the few games where, if I plugged in my headphones to the Xbox One controller, allowed me to hear the dialogue and music, and while I couldn’t play more than maybe 90 minutes without a break, it was broken down into bitesize chunks that made progress possible, and offered plenty of natural checkpoints.

One Achievement escaped me, no matter how many times I tried to unlock it… on the Xbox that just means 985 Gamerscore out of the 1,000 on offer, no great loss… on PlayStation that means 375 XP down the swanny as the Platinum Trophy also vanishes… surely there will be a decent guide for that Trophy by now?

On sale for £2.99 in a sale it was worth the purchase, an under-appreciated title and a chance to play the game when completely fit and healthy… why the hell not.

August 4^th

With Star Wars: Outlaws landing at the end of August rather than start anything huge, I figure I’ll spend the month clearing some of the backlog and working on Indie Fest titles… and this is around an 8-10 hour game if you take it slowly so it fits in nicely.

I remember much of the gameplay, but not the location of every collectible so I’ve a guide to follow to pick all those up, and I’m hoping that the one Achievement I missed will pop on the PlayStation version to give my the Platinum at the end of it.

August 12^th

I can’t pretend that this is not annoying… the one Achievement that eluded me on the Xbox version… the trophy popped easily… and now I’m tempted to buy the Xbox version again to give it another go for that one elusive Achievement.

More so as the game is now on sale (at time of writing) for just £2.99

One thing I had forgotten is that there were 7 possible endings, and only a couple of these are remotely good… I know it’s a title about the horrors of the first world war, but still… more so is that the endings guide I was using decided to give the best of the endings (where Harry gets the girl and lives happily ever after) at the very start, so the last 30 minutes were filled with the terrible endings.

Yes, it’s the nature of the game, but because 5 or so of these require you to replay the same conversation over and over and over, it takes a little bit of shine off the game.

I still appreciate the art style, the excellent voice acting and the story as a whole… the whole painting vibe of the graphics has meant that, overall, it’s aged really well… I get the feeling it never sold very well, the ending says that there are more memories to be retold, which hints at another game… but 6 years on not a word.

My 91^st Platinum Trophy… and thoughts start to turn towards what I could use for my landmark 100^th in a few months or so… I have a few ideas, but I’d like it to be something worthwhile as opposed to something played for easy score.