Now here’s a thing… this game is better than the score at the end suggests… but unlike some of the other titles I’ve played as part of Indie Fest, this is actually trying to go for the dated, horrible look it creates, it aims to have minimal sound effects and dated gameplay… and I’ve allowed for this in the score… but while that’s the case, there’s no way this can score any higher.

The original Elena Temple game aimed to recreate a game from my youth, in my eyes at least it was a ZX Spectrum game… monochrome graphics, blocky platform graphics and everything else that came as part of gaming on that machine at that time.

It was also a relatively easy 1,000 Gamerscore… this game sets out to imitate on of those Nintendo, pre-Gameboy, handheld releases, so we have basic graphics, minimal animation and single tone sound effects… and it recreates the look of those perfectly.

The problem is that it does it too well.

It was cheap, really cheap considering I was given an Xbox gift card a week before, so the £2.49 they’re charging was easily avoided… and it’s another simple enough completion… and as seems to be the case nowadays, it starts with an update included so kicks off with 2,000 Gamerscore on offer.

The premise is simple, Elena has to collect all the coins on the level to open a door to the next level, and she does this by walking and jumping along platforms, avoiding spikes and using portals to teleport around the level.

One key aspect is that, if you collect a crystal, you can rewind the last 4 or 5 drops off platforms… so if you’re falling towards a spike, you can rewind and return to the platform you fell off.

The key is using this properly so that you don’t find yourself in a position where some coins are inaccessible, or you can’t reach the door… on one level I could only get so high on the screen and couldn’t avoid a portal on another platform so I couldn’t reach the door to finish the level.

There are 23 screens of this (at least) to progress through… 20 main and 3 bonus levels… which all have an Achievement linked to them… and that appears to be that.

Now I suck at logical thought in games like this, but managed to work through 6 levels in around 25 minutes when I first booted it up… there’s no animation, you just appear in the next block left or right when you move, if you jump you just move up one block briefly… you can’t jump from platform to platform, just fall… overall, it recreates a “game and watch” type experience… but really… why would you want to?

Maybe it’s because I’m in a retro phase at the moment (replaying the original Borderlands, the PS5 upgrade of Fallout 4, and I’ve purchased an original Xbox all in the last week) but even bumping the graphics, sound and gameplay up a little because they have achieved what they set out to do… it still lands at 51% here… and that’s Crapfest territory.

As the 23 levels progress it adds new mechanics… one way doors, one way passages, Spiders that will move horizontally or vertically if they see you… but at best these are annoying, and the monochrome graphics don’t help, near the end of one stage I had to restart as I hadn’t spotted the crumbling floor graphic under a ladder.

In the end it finishes with just 47% which is almost a little too high for the game… not one to recommend.

Full disclosure here… I am a big fan of Bethesda RPGs.

I know they aren’t for everybody, that they tend to be bug ridden, and have recently become over obsessed with crafting… but I enjoy playing (and replaying) them.

And, I can see why Starfield was considered a let down by some… and to me it was because it removed one key element to all their titles… the random side quest found whilst exploring a location that distracts you as you travel to whatever quest you were doing.

Many a time I’ve promised myself that I’d call it a night when I hit a town in Skyrim, only to find myself exploring a cave I found on the way, only to find myself 2 hours later on the far side of the map on a totally different quest, promising myself I’d save at the next town (not a chance this is the same next town as before) and so on.

With Starfield effectively making you fast-travel to every location by having them on different planets, the chances of stumbling over a quest are fairly slim… yes, they included random encounters such as a ship trying to sell you an extended warranty on your new spacecraft… but these are few and far between and won’t open any sort of wild goose chase quest that, say, entering into a drinking contest will in Whiterun.

In April 2024, Bethesda released a next gen patch for Fallout 4, and while this has no effect on the Achievements on the Xbox side of things, it did open up a new Trophy list on the PS5 and, fresh off the TV series, I jumped back into Fallout for a 3^rd run through.

At least I would once I remembered my PSN login for my US account which is what I bought the Game of the Year PS4 edition on when I wanted to play the DLC a few years ago.

It wouldn’t log me in on console using every variation of my password, and the email it’s linked to is my office email, and I’m not in the office for another week… so I can’t get a password reset email… and then, randomly… it logged me.

Now… I set out to play the game totally differently to how I have done before… and failed… I have immense respect for those who can totally change their play style for games like this… where they can go the full idiot route and play through the game using a character who can barely string a sentence together… I, personally, just can’t do it.

So instead, I’m playing the same game as I have every time (which I’m okay with) and, having played through it before, I know what to expect, what I need to do, which options to take in certain missions to allow me to collect all the Trophies with the minimal amount of save manipulation and so on.

I’m currently 44 hours in (being off work for a week through a combination of holidays, weekends and illness helped her) and I’ve reached the point where I need to make a save from which I can facilitate both main ending routes, one of which I will then use for starting on the DLC packs at some point in the future.

Yesterday I went hunting Giant creatures to kill for a Trophy, I then went and hunted down all but 1 of the bobbleheads (the final one being in the next main mission) and set up some stores in Sanctuary to have the “Maximum Happiness” Trophy working away in the back ground while I complete the end game… I also have 15 miscellaneous tasks to complete and level up a few more times to hit Level 50.

Original Text – “What I am impressed with… not by the next gen upgrade as the game is showing its age at this point… is that despite having run through the game several times before I’ve still stumbled over things that I haven’t seen before.

Now this maybe because I wasn’t following every mission through 100% correctly before… but in the Saurus Steelworks, previously I’d never noticed a smaller side quest to collect a special weapon, which required you to upgrade a suit of Power Armour to allow you to walk through the molten steel to reach it… this in turn meant I was being ambushed by a team of Brotherhood Knights angry that I had this weapon, which eventually lead me to try and take down a base they had in the Glowing Sea.”

Edit – So… seems this was a mis-step on my part… Bethesda have added 7 additional quests to the main game that had been created by the community since the game originally released.

And, it transpires, that I have completed 2 of these without realising they were even there, and had stumbled over them as I wandered around the map.

What replaying this game has achieved though, is making me want another Fallout or Elder Scrolls title, and caused me to resent that they spent years working on Starfield when they could have been working on either of the other series… there doesn’t seem to be the huge range of options or locations for Starfield to evolve into a huge franchise like either of the big two names Bethesda are associated with.

By all means keep the next “big” games for those in house, but they allowed Obsidian to create New Vegas, the London mod that’s been delayed thanks to the new upgrade looks incredible… how about bringing that in house and having them offer that as a standalone title on consoles?

Less than a week before my 54^th birthday… an age younger me thought I’d never reach… an age younger me thought would have you class as a relic of a different era… obviously, as that number rushes closer and closer by the second, I no longer see it as quite the dusty landmark number as I did before.

Especially as, among my circle of friends and golfing buddies, I’m the youngster.

I’m slowly coming out of a gaming slump brought on by the realisation that, whilst it’s a fun story, One Piece Odyssey was not the best game to jump into after a 60+ hour Banishers run… thanks to Borderlands and a couple of quick, relatively fun, completions to boost my pointless, meaningless Gamerscore total.

And… I’ve decided what I want to buy myself as a present… an original Xbox.

The VCR sized black box with the green Xbox inset in the top… and the chance to complete something I never managed to when I owned one before… Halo.

Ever since I started gaming in my early teens I’ve been a multi-system gamer… I owned both a ZX Spectrum and a Commodore 64 at school, when, after a hiatus, I got into console gaming I owned a PlayStation, then a Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 with some dabbling in Nintendo via the original Gameboy, and my daughters Nintendo 64 and Gamecube.

All of it has been driven by the fear of missing out on some epic games… Resident Evil, one of my favourite series on the grey slab PlayStation went Dreamcast exclusive and Code Veronica released, and by owning a Dreamcast I also got to play Virtua Tennis, Shenmue, Confidential Mission and others.

I picked up a PlayStation 2 for Onimusha, and got to play Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City… the original Xbox gave me access to Halo, Deus Ex Invisible War and two epic RPGs in Knights of the Old Republic and the sequel… I grabbed a 360 because I wanted to play Oblivion… and so on.

The original Xbox was the first console to dispense with memory cards, that hideous “tax” on console gamers who wanted to save their progress… and, because game stores never bothered with stuff like this, my second-hand Xbox came with a host of game saves on the hard drive… naturally, as the “must have” title, Halo was there.

As the “must have” title I grabbed a copy of Halo as well, and enjoyed the experience immensely, until I hit a point where I couldn’t progress… I needed to destroy something but had no weapon ammo to do that, with no enemies left to kill there was no way I could change those weapons I had for ones with ammo or that recharged over time… I had no shield so I couldn’t use myself as a battering ram… so I stopped… I’ve since found out that the end was within reach had I been able to find my way out of the situation.

I’m watching them on Ebay, even bidding on a couple… I know how much I’m prepared to pay… and am loathe to go over that… mainly because there will be other costs involved.

I’ll need a HDMI adaptor to plug them into my monitor, and some of the games I want to play I’ll have to buy separately… I really want to play Deus Ex: Invisible War again, I never experienced the original Forza Motorsport, I yearn to replay Links Golf… and there are a couple of others I’d pick up if I see them… Knights of the Old Republic originals obviously.

My current Ebay spot doesn’t finish until the end of the week… and it looks a great buy if I can get it, but having seen other consoles sell for decent money I can see myself being priced out of this before it ends… but I’m determined to get one… it’s just a matter of time.

April 22^nd

As I expected, the console I’d been biding on went above what I’m prepared to pay, with over a week remaining… two others came and went for more than I was prepared to pay.

May 1^st

After a couple more failures on Ebay, my other half is starting to get annoyed… partly because if she’d known I wanted to get one she could have got me one for my recent birthday… and looks on Gumtree for a local seller.

There’s one, within 5 miles, console (working with all the cables) and 3 pads, complete with 12 games… £40

Turns out the original location is an error, as there is no option to put his real location, he went with something close… he’s a mile away near one of my favourite pubs.

All this is garnered through his message exchange with my other half (he ignored my contact message) and we eventually get proof it’s working through a Whatsapp video… next day we call round and it’s now all mine… of the 12 games there’s just 1 on my list of wants… the other 11 hit Ebay along with the memory card I won’t need.

Turns out one of the pads is wireless (but takes 4 batteries) so I’ll rig that up and give it a test… people are asking £40 for those on Ebay, so if I sell it as well as the games and card, I ought to be able to turn a profit.

Now the task of picking up the other games I want… one I find on Ebay for £3 so I order that, another has a copy in a local second-hand store for £1 so I’m off there soon to pick that up… the rest may take some time.

Sadly, 2 of those I’d like (and I included 1 of these when I sold the console) seem to be rather sought after and are selling for upwards of £20 and £30 respectively so these may be non-starters.

May 6^th

Shopping over… the console, a converter so I can hook the console up to a modern monitor and 10 selected titles… at this point has cost me £91.25 before any funds trickle in attempting to sell the games that came bundled with it.

I’ve managed to get hold of the following titles;

Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, Deus Ex: Invisible War, Forza Motorsport, Project Gotham Racing 2, Links, Fable, Jade Empire and both Knights of the Old Republic titles to go alongside Halo which came with the console… for the princely sum of just £41.65

All I’m waiting for now is a steady stream of 8 more packages to arrive in the post and I’m good to go.

Time to admit it… I made a terrible mistake… not by not playing this game sooner, but with what I played after I had finished my Ascend run of Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden.

Instead of taking some time out and playing something a little smaller, I jumped straight into a huge JRPG and while I’ve been enjoying my time with that… fatigue has become an issue… even harvesting some easy points on my Xbox has almost become a chore… granted the games in question (Neon Lore and Swordbreaker: Origins) weren’t the best of quality, but that doesn’t change that I’ve found myself in a bit of a slump.

I had intended to include Swordbreaker as part of Indie Fest… but in truth I never really paid much attention to what was happening, and I concentrated on unlocking the full 1,000 over the actual story.

So, I turned to Cocoon to be my April 24 game for milking the Achievement tasks on Gamepass… slightly perplexed by 11 of the 17 Achievements having the same description… if the developer’s previous games are anything to go by (a lot of the team here worked on Limbo and Inside) then it should be fun.

April 16^th

Well… what to say… it’s fine… I guess.

While I can appreciate the graphics, the incidental music and the puzzles… wonder at the inception like logic of diving into individual worlds and taking other worlds into other unique worlds… there is one thing missing.

An answer to the question… why?

Maybe I’ve missed something massive… but so far, and I estimate I’m around 75% through the game at this point, I haven’t seen anything as to why I’m doing everything.

Why was I so keen to get the Orange Orb which shows me hidden pathways? Why did I strive to get the Green Orb that allows me to change the solidity of other platforms? Why was I yearning for the Purple Orb that renews itself every time I pick another Orb from the ground? Why did all these combined allow me to get the White Orb that fires missiles at prisms?

Nothing I have seen explains why I’m doing all this at all.

And while we’re at it… why does my character have wings if I can’t jump let alone fly around the worlds?

Why, if I’ve got a massive pair of wings on my back, am I having to locate the switch for the path to the next area when I should be able to jump over and flap my way over.

Maybe all this will become clear and it turns out to be, which is my current guess, a sort of “right of passage” exodus or pilgrimage to become an adult… with wings.

In Limbo you were trying to get to safety… in Inside you were trying to rescue whatever that thing in the tank was… these story elements became clear as you progressed through the story… here… I’m lost, clueless as to why I’ve found myself in this land and why I took the time to collect the 3 Orbs, only to have them taken from me when I collected the 4^th Orb… and I’m now striving to get the first 3 back from the 4^th boss.

Right now, when it comes to scoring it’s up there with the best… until you take into account the near total lack of story which has hammered the overall score to the high 60’s… story score wise, it’s up there with the inane Quintus and the Absent Truth at 2/10.

It’s highly polished, the graphics look great, the puzzles always logical and even the boss battles are planned out and executed nicely… granted it’s a little on the long side, and some of what you’re doing does seem pointless repetition of what you’ve already done (see lack of story) but this may all make sense at the end.

April 21st

Well… without a guide I would have gotten nowhere with this… as I play along with the video, I just can’t help but wonder how you’d work through some of the sections without assistance… so much swapping of the Orbs to get inside one Orb whilst carrying another to open a portal to get another… my head just hurts thinking about it.

I’m near the end… and I’ll happily never go anywhere near the game after that… I still haven’t a clue as to why you’re doing all these things, and it’s running out of time to tell me why as well.

Score wise, it’s a rather average 65% from me… sure there’s a lot of polish to the game… but with so little in the way of story that I can see it becomes a chore at times… even Jusant explained the story to the player via the letters and notes you could find along the way.

Achievement wise so many of the 17 on offer being for awakening various Ancestors is all well and good… but it does, to me at least, signal a lack of imagination, especially as the description for each is identical.

April 22^nd

Credits have rolled… and I’m still more or less none the wiser as to the story.

I guess you become what was effectively the fourth boss of the game, and the cycle starts again when another winged creature appears and starts collecting the Orbs… but that is just a guess.

Looking at the time I spent with the game, it shows how important the story is for me in a game… I can appreciate the graphics, the puzzles and polish of Cocoon… but the fact that the story feels close to non-existent really affected my enjoyment level.

For all it’s strong points, that I finished the game and STILL couldn’t see why I was doing everything that I was doing is not something I expected when I started a game that has received near universal praise from critics.

For a while I was debating with myself whether or not a game that finds itself in Gamepass day one should qualify for Indie Fest… once that had been decided, would I actually play this game at all… and then the walkthrough guides appeared on YouTube and they clocked in at under 40 minutes.

Now the guides skip past as much of the dialogue as they can, hammered the A button to skip, which I didn’t do… if I’m playing what is essentially a walking simulator with a story bolted on you may as well follow the story.

It’s not a long game, even following the story it’s only around 70 minutes start to finish… and the story isn’t that good either, with the game being less than a week old as I write this, I’ll refrain from posting any spoilers, but the game ended up annoying me to hell.

The background graphics are pretty good, there’s a high level of detail that you’d expect to see of a modern-day game, although you move very slowly around it… but what really bugged me was the characters.

There are 2 and they appear as cartoon character models… and no effort has been made at all to synch their mouths up with the conversation… and by “no effort” what I mean is… for large portions of the conversation they don’t even open their mouths at all.

They stand there, lips pursed tightly together, while their voice actor reads the lines out.

And after an hour that really, really bugged me.

Horrible, bordering on the unforgivable!

Sound wise it was generic fair, gameplay is the usual walking simulator, first person at a snails pace looking and examining everything to find the item needed (usually a key) or the object required to trigger the next mini scene… it’s very predictable and very… sort of… meh!

Had this not been on Gamepass I wouldn’t have touched it, the review scores are hoovering around the 6/10 mark and I can see why… what it does, it does reasonably well… but what it does is really bland.

It has enough polish to look the part, there are a couple of nice Achievements to unlock that make you have to do something different than the norm… but the blandness of the story, and the characters being ventriloquists cost it when it comes to scoring.

In line with the reviews I’ve seen this ends up with an Indie Fest score of 65% which, quite aptly. Have this as this 4^th ranked game of the 7 that I’ve played to date… so it’s average… in every way.

Two years ago today I took the plunge and upgraded my Xbox Live subscription, of which I had 2 years subscription remaining, to Gamepass Ultimate… for the princely sum of 1 pound, I now had 25 months of free games to look forward to… well, not technically free… 4p a month.

In total I’ve paid the huge amount of £3 for Gamepass over the years, previously grabbing a month to play Hellblade when that launched, and a second £1 months later to play The Medium at launch.

And I was fine with using the system to play that way… okay, so I had to create a burner account to get the second month, but that wasn’t exactly a hardship.

But… eventually… it became too good a deal to pass up and I took advantage of the Ultimate upgrade path.

Since then, I’ve extended the subscription using Reward Points, initially waiting till I had 35,000 to add 3 months at a time, recently using the Auto-Redeem feature to add a month for 10,500 automatically on the first of each month.

I’m currently good until 5 October 2026.

Being a sad, statistics obsessed, OCD leaning bloke… I’ve kept tabs on what I’ve played and how much money I’ve saved on game purchases… in the 1^st year of using the service I played 10 games which would have cost me £150.73 so around the same price I’d have paid had I been using actual cash to subscribe.

Mostly I played a few games that I would have milked for Gamerscore anyway, but felt the costs were too high… Unpacking was a fun game, but not £17 worth to me, Somerville was a decent Limbo style game, but not at £22.49

This 2^nd year the quality of what I’ve played has certainly increased, and it included Starfield at launch… I’ve played through 13 games and saved myself £277.49

Far more, new, day 1, releases… Coffee Talk 2, Ravenlok, Bramble, Venba, Jusant and Open Roads… of the 13 only 1 was a real disappointment… Frog Detective… what an appalling mess that was.

Add in Starfield, which is a game that has certainly split opinion (often along console loyalty lines) and a bonus reduced price on the early access addition which includes the DLC… and you have to see that, even for someone who jumps between consoles such a I do, Gamepass really pass for itself.

And when you extend or pay for it using Reward points… so it costs me nothing at all… it’s clear why some people consider games played on Gamepass to be free… I certainly do.

For me part of the allure of playing video games is that they can take you away from the real world briefly, into a fantastical world of wonder… where gallant knights fight for a maiden’s honour, where you can finally don the green jacket for winning The Masters, where you become an all-powerful Vampire slayer riding the kingdom of vermin.

Quintus and the Absent Truth is not that sort of game… going from the 2 chapters I played in the first 20 minutes, my child has been kidnapped and, apparently, her mother died in childbirth… lets knock a couple of points off for story then… great start.

In truth the first 2 Chapters of the game are incredibly short… just as well as the graphical style is quite hideous, it may be trying to convey the fact that it’s dark, but we’re talking simple outlines on a single colour backdrop… and while this may be just me, but the contrast was terrible… and there’s nothing in the settings to allow you to change the setup… at times I was struggling to see the doorways, corridors or anything that I was supposed to be interacting with.

At the same time, I’m not really sure about the Quintus mechanic… he’s a mouse and clearly your friend, at times where you can’t reach something because it’s too narrow, you use Quintus to help… so he can fetch you a key you’ve clumsily dropped behind some shelves, or scurry along an air vent to get you a page from a book… all this seems logical.

What isn’t logical is how, in the second Chapter, he opens a door for you from the inside… he’s a sodding mouse, how does he manage that? They show a chair positioned by the door to show how he may have reached the handle, but how did he move the chair?

After my first, short, foray into the game it’s a new low for Indiefest scoring… the final 2 Chapters will need to go some to change that… and I’m sceptical about whether that is possible.

A couple of days later and the end game appears… and it is truly awful, the story a mess and the whole Qunitus mechanic (when shown later) reveals this as being an appalling piece of software.

Story wise… it’s awful… seems you and your wife were musicians, and with her death in childbirth and your subsequent move into a self-imposed exile, the record company have decided… get this… to turn to the black arts and use your daughter in a ritual to bring your wife back from the dead to save their fortunes.

Yep… told you it was bad.

They’ve dug your good lady’s body up and plan to sacrifice your daughter to facilitate the resurrection and, if the poorly animated scene near the end is anything to go by, the spirit of your wife saves the day by snatching her back and taking out the record company executives.

Awful… terrible… distasteful.

As the game concludes it turns out that Quintus is actually a freaking cuddly toy, and all the sections where he “helps” you out by crawling along a tight spot to get a key… never happened, you were just doing this yourself whilst holding the toy.

Now if my kid had been kidnapped the first thing on my mind wouldn’t be to grab a cuddly toy to help me find her… even worse, there were large sections of the game where you played as Quintus… now did these actually exist in any sort of reality? Were they just included to pad the game out to some sort of acceptable length?

Scoring wise this is the new low… 42% and it was lucky to get that much.

The end of March was always going to be taken up playing a JRPG… I just didn’t expect it to be this one… this was supposed to be when I played the second part of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake… but the more I hear in podcasts and on Discord forums, the less it looks like I’ll play that.

One Piece Odyssey on the other hand is something I have literally zero experience of… anywhere, never seen the anime, never read the books, never played any of the previous games… but I loved the look of the game from the trailers, and hearing that it was almost a “greatest hits” version of the series sounded great… that it was also supposedly on the easy side was even better.

On top of all this I’ve not played a JRPG for a long time… and with the game being on sale at the same time when I was struggling to think of something for my better half to buy me for our 28^th anniversary… it was a no-brainer.

With Banishers done and dusted it’s time to play…

March 12^th

Yep… I know nothing, on the characters, so I’ve no idea of any special abilities… and the game seems to assume to know these things, so when faced with a closed gate I was clueless as to how to get passed it… seems Zoro can cut through some doors with his swords, thankfully when I approached the door the option of “leave it to Zoro” appeared and the character stepped up to the plate.

Story wise, having crashed their ship near a remote, normally hidden, island the crew are stripped of their powers by Lim, a female resident, merely by touching them… so as you progress the game you have to find small cubes with which to unlock their abilities again.

This does a decent job of explaining why the powers you used in the intro section are suddenly missing and your level has dropped from the low 40s to a base 1 all around…it doesn’t explain why, when faced with an enemy I fought in the intro, their HP has suddenly dropped from around 1,000 which took 2 hits to kill, will suddenly die from a kick that does just 96 damage but we’re quibbling.

At present the game won’t let me explore either, telling me off if I wander too much and thrusting me back onto the path it wants me to take… curses.

Due to a hangover from Banishers (3 Achievements left) I don’t get to play for long… but I want to play more.

March 24^th

Two huge sessions and I’m now around 16 hours in, up to Chapter 4, and enjoying the story… but I will admit that some of the combat elements are grating a little.

Each region will have its own style of enemies to fight, and the consistency just isn’t there… in one combat encounter a move may do 1,400 damage to a specific enemy type… next combat encounter only 650 with no obvious difference or explanation as to why… if this is all down to some hidden random number generator then the range needs tweaking.

I’m learning about the characters a little, nowhere near enough to fully understand everything, but there is a nice range of abilities to call on, and plenty of possible moves to pull of when you are in combat.

Whether my growing boredom with repeatedly fighting soldiers/sailors/scorpions is the game or my lack of real experience with the anime or game genre is unknown… but there may come a point where I call it quits here.

Having completed the boss battle at the end of the second Chapter, it became obvious there was a second fight coming, this time much harder than before and while I scraped through it did sow the first seeds of doubt in my mind that I may be in too deep.

If this becomes a pattern (and having beaten a boss in Chapter 3 who then mutated/changed into another form it may be) then that won’t help keep me playing to the end of Chapter 9 and the end of the game.

Story wise… it’s fine… that’s all I can say really, I’m sure a rabid fan of the series would be getting way more out of it than I am, but I knew this might be a problem when I started.

Having been shipwrecked on a strange island named Waford the crew are stripped of their powers by Lim, as part of a defence mechanism to protect her and the island, having realised the crew aren’t as evil as most pirates, and are actually a decent bunch of oddballs, she sets out to help them recover these that are now in cube form scattered over the island and in Memoria, a bizarre world based on memories of their past encounters.

The island of Waford is controlled by 4 guardians the crew has to defeat to get their powers back, once they have defeated the guardian, an old memory is opened up where they repeat a famous adventure culminating in taking down an old evil foe.

Which is really where all the fan service kicks in.

In the first of these episodes, you’re helping a princess stop civil wat in her land being orchestrated by Crocodile, the two-part boss I moaned about earlier.

Once this Chapter has been completed you move onto the next guardian, only you realise you can’t reach them in their temple without help so Chapter 3 is the process of finding the assistance you need, no real boss battle here, but some nice character progression and some very small side quests.

Chapter 4 is a different region and a different boss… this time a water themed world (the first being desert based) and a different boss.

In the first Chapter 1 character was absent for much of the time, they explained that at the time of the original episode they hadn’t been friends with the princess so their presence may not go down well… in this new world a character chooses to stay with the ship… and that’s been stolen, and he’s been kidnapped so for a second time you’re a member light in combat.

By close of play I’ve moved onto the second large region of the Chapter, and I’m hoping that the game doesn’t push me away come the end… because even with my lack of knowledge, it’s been mostly fun to this point.

As far as grabbing my attention goes, Return to Grace does a lot of things right…

1. A short science fiction story along the lines of an abandoned complex and a long dormant AI

2. Graphics which give off a total Bioshock vibe

3. Puzzles which (so far) fit in with the game rather than being shoe-horned in

4. Free on Gamepass

and so, when faced with a couple of evenings when diving deep into New Eden in Banishers wasn’t going to be an option, I downloaded the game and started my journey.

March 4^th

Very early steps, I intended to just play maybe 15 minutes to start off and got way further into the game than I had expected to.

You play Adie who has learnt of a sort of supreme construct called Grace that used to control a lot of human life, who went offline many years ago and has since drifted into virtual legend… there are no written records of Grace’s existence (as Grace controlled all physical records) and she has spent years studying artefacts and listening to what few audio records remain, to learn the supposed whereabouts of Grace’s physical location.

Accompanied by Allen her AI companion (worn on the wrist, this is what Apple watches will mutate into) she crash-lands on Ganymede (one of Jupiter’s Moons is I remember my schooling correctly) and sets out to find Grace.

Which is where you come in, controlling Adie as she first finds and then explores a now dormant and abandoned facility on a cold, harsh, moonscape.

Practically as soon as she enters Allen is replaced by a new AI, who refers to herself as Logic… later you will also encounter the AI named Control and another Empathy (there may be more, I’m still in the early days) who all operate various functions of the facility… Logic attempts to assist you, Control demands you leave and Empathy is currently working on restarting the Life Support systems so you don’t die.

From what I’ve seen this will require a couple of runs, one following Control’s instructions instantly (rather than wandering off and examining other items) which will be a second, most likely shorter, run once I’ve done searching every nook and cranny.

Small quandary… among the criteria when I score these games is for the characters within, a game like Gris is exempt as there was just the one, whereas Lake had a couple of interesting characters it was populated by bland personas so scored just 2 (out of 5) as this… well… the “characters” as it were, are just the voices of the AI components of Grace… does that really make them characters?

With it being a Gamepass title, I’m also using the game, as a whole, to milk the daily Achievement task and (hopefully) the “Quest Completionist” task for monthly reward points… so the next several sessions make be brief 10 minute bursts to unlock an Achievement, so my usual dated updates would be out of keeping for this one.

March 17^th

After a week or so of short bursts to pop an Achievement and keep the Reward Points ticking over I’m near the end game and preparing for the second run… sometimes it annoys me when a complete second run is needed, such as with banishers where I need to replay around 30 hours (rough estimate) to pop the final Achievements needed for completion, but with this being a 2-3 hour game max, a streamlined second play isn’t that much of an issue.

Like many games of this type the story is played out and revealed slowly… in this case as Grace went offline all the Pilgrims who had come to visit rioted, the Keeper who was previously in a position of power and respected by all, is now hunted down by the Pilgrims who have blamed him.

I’m currently outside in a storm climbing to the final location (at least I think it’s the final location) for the first ending… after that I’ll wait until the weekend and do the second run in a single sitting rather than stretching it out over a few days.

March 20^th

All done… second run completed, all Achievements popped and a sense of satisfaction… this was a game worth playing.

Of the two endings, the first one I reached was considered the “good” ending, all of Grace’s circuits have been restored and her personality is a bend of all the AI’s that you’ve communicated with throughout the game… which could have been improved on a little, one of these is barely used at all… only really being needed at one point in the game after which they get forgotten somewhat.

In this ending Grace explains why she shut down and why you’ll be an excellent Keeper (the Keeper being the person who acts as a voice for Grace and those who make the pilgrimage to the centre.

In the other ending, the “bad” ending something didn’t really make sense… the more dominant AI you talk to, Control, offers to assist you if you throw your communicator away, which the game seems to imply also means throwing away the other AI voices, Logic, Empathy and so on… but that wouldn’t make any sense… and you’re left feeling a little confused.

You raise the beacons to alert the universe to Grace’s return, but it seems to imply the only portion of her that would have any say in the matter would be Control themselves.

Either way, this is a small gripe… on the Indie Fest scoring this ended up at 78% overall… the AI characters are all pretty good, but one is used just once making it an almost after thought to include it, unlike the others it doesn’t chime in for the rest of the game and the one task it is used for could have been handled by the others… still puts it second thus far on my Indie games for the year.

The biggest Achievement streak I have was 40 consecutive days covering most of March 23 and the start of April 23 where I unlocked a total of 296 Achievements… this surpassed my previous best of 38 days when I started Crapfest at the end of 2020 which ran through January 2021 where, due to the nature of playing a crappy title every day for a month I also unlocked 662 Achievements.

I mention this as a huge part (at least a third) of the 296 total came from 1 game… Vampire Survivors.

The game currently sits with 196 Achievements for 1,500 Gamerscore… this is the home of the 5 point Achievement, and it hands them out like the Pharmacy at the White House handed out medication during the Orange Buffoons tenure… it’s easy to pick up 5 or 6 Achievements in a single run early on.

The game has that “one more run” element that meant my first quick play of the game ended up lasting 3 hours.

Sadly, and this is the same for a lot people, once all the Achievements pop and the game has been 100% completed… the lure of the game wanes… more DLC will no doubt land, and I’ll buy it on release, but the urge to play this, previously untouched, genre remains… a new Vampire Survivors had to be found… say hello to Army of Ruin.

Whereas Vampire Survivors (hereby referred to as VS) looks like it could run on my old Commodore 64, Army of Ruin looks like a current gen game… HD graphics, flash explosions, no obvious slowdown when the action gets manic (there are times at the end of a run on VS where it’s impossible to see what’s happening, you’re so over-powered that the whole screen is a mass of attacking chaos and even on a Series X starts to see the game judder along) and a decent tune plays continuously.

It offers more of a challenge, the 5^th (and hardest) area named “Shrine” is a proper test if you’re not prepared for it… after over 20 hours of play to date that’s the area where I’ve made least progress towards, and looking at the Achievements I’ve yet to unlock, and the area which contains the final few Achievements if I were to get to the stage where I think I could complete the game.

Each of the 5 areas (Graveyard, Forest, Forge, Glacier and Shrine) has 3 levels consisting of 10, 15 and 20 waves of enemy attacks… these are 1 minute apart… at the end of these the boss appears, kill them and the run is over and Victory is proclaimed.

Each of the 3 levels has 3 different challenges all with their own Achievement… 1 for completing the level at all, and 2 for meeting various weapon-based challenges such as getting Meteorite to stage 5.

On top of these there is an infinite run setting where the goal is to hit 30 minutes… so 10 stars for each area.

Then you can add 6 challenges of varying difficulty to each level, so completing the first Graveyard level with a certain character, with enemies having more health, less XP on offer, damage reduced and so on… these challenges unlock other weapons, trinkets (which add status boosts and can help evolve a weapon to it’s highest level) and characters.

Most importantly… the game is fun.

The similarities to VS are obvious with the weapons, Garlic (which in VS was shown by an area surrounding the player with an area where any enemy entering took damage) is replaced by Toxic Stench which does the same thing, the circling Bibles of VS (which circled the player as they moved) are replaced by Meteorites, Holy Water (which dropped bottles of holy water around the player which damaged enemies as they passed over) are replaced with spears that produce electrified pools… and so on… to evolve a weapon to it’s higher state you need to pick up a trinket which matches that power, so a fire weapon will be evolved by a trinket such as Magnifying Glass which will, every 30 seconds, damage every enemy on screen with fire… the level of damage and delay between bursts are altered as you level up the trinket, so it will become every 20 seconds for higher damage and so on.

I’m at the stage where I’ve unlocked 79/98 Achievements… and those remaining are starting to look hard… completing a level without moving, or taking damage… there are solutions online (thanks to TrueAchievements.com) and from those I need to complete some of the challenges to unlock a particular character or item to help me.

If I don’t then this is in danger of being the first game this year where I don’t achieve 100% completion… and, being honest at this point, that’s looking fairly likely… the game is on PS4 and PS5 and some of the harder Achievements didn’t make it across… there are only 55 Trophies to unlock, and those linked to “not moving”, “take no damage” and “don’t open any chests” are all absent… a second purchase is starting to look likely here.

March 21st

I’m close to hitting my ceiling as far as Achievements go… what remains are mostly those that require a hell of a lot of upgrades from the store and the money to buy those would require a lot of grinding… so while I’m not giving up on unlocking more Achievements, it will take many, many hours of continued play to get to the point where I could realistically expect to unlock them.

It’s a fun game, but while it certainly edges Vampire Survivors in looks and audio… the large difficulty spike for the Shrine area, and the Achievement structure lets it down a little… 83/98 Achievements unlocked currently isn’t a bad effort, but I don’t really find grinding a fun mechanic… it’s why I’ve not hit Level 100 in Starfield yet… whereas Vampire Survivors is a game I can play for fun without feeling the need to constantly be unlocking things to have fun.