Damn, I am way behind on this. It's been a whopping ten months since my last post, and I getting somewhat caught up at the time. This is going to be the ultimate slam recap. I'll do another one for 2024 at some point.

For April, I tried doing another point-and-click adventure month, but only played two games: Runaway: A Road Adventure and its first sequel, Runaway: The Dream of the Turtle. I had tried and failed on two previous occasions to complete the former, and finally did it this time. It was only decent. A few other the puzzles were absolutely ridiculous, with solutions no sane individual could ever come up with, but many others were sensible and well crafted. It was nice to get it off my list two decades after first playing it. The sequel though. Ugh. The main character is the most annoying douchebag in it. Just an intolerable jerk. I couldn't make myself finish it, although I did make a large chunk of progress. Maybe I'll get back into it at some point. There is a third and final game in the trilogy I haven't even looked at, but have in my Steam library.

For June, I had the "Jejune" event, where I played a total grab bag of games:

1. Broforce - Goofy action platformer I've had for years but never tried. Essentially a pixelated 80s action film, with parodies of all the stars of the era as characters. Decent but not captivating.
2. Despotism 3k - A simplistic sorta resource management game where you're an evil computer using humans to power your machines. You have to build up your population to achieve bigger goals, and there is something of a weird timeloop storyline going on too. It was pretty addictive. I dumped almost 20hrs into it and completed the first two tiers of the story. I think there was one more layer that I didn't complete, but can't remember for sure.
3. Eternal Journey: New Atlantis - A hidden object game that I discovered after asking for xenoarchaeology games on Reddit. Wasn't incredible, but it somewhat scratched the itch. Only took a dozen hours to complete, and probably some of that was idling time.
4. Expand - I hesitate to put this one on the list, since I barely played it, but it was in the category, so it counts. A very minimalist action puzzle game where you guide a square through ever-shifting mazes. Kind of fun, but again, I only played it for maybe half an hour.
5. Fears to Fathom - Episode 1 - A very simple horror game where you have to guide a lost person through some haunted forest park. I only played it for half an hour and failed in my attempt. Meh.
6. Grey Instinct - Very short prologue to a planned longer game where you explore something like an arcade to figure out what happened to a missing person. It has a Japanese flavor, with a female friend who you obviously share mutual attraction with but of course neither has mentioned before. Took less than an hour to beat.
7. Jagged Alliance Gold - Really old 90s turn-based combat game. If I had played this in the 90s, I might have a ton of nostalgia for it, but the game mechanics are just wonky and a pain to deal with. I struggled with the combat and didn't really enjoy it. Only played it for a little more than an hour.
8. Pentiment - Easily the best game I played in June. Sort of a point and click, but almost entirely dialog-focused. It was divided into three sections. I loved the first two, but felt like the third kind of screwed things up and didn't make a ton of sense. Still, the journey was great.

Then for Halloween Horror (I've renamed it I guess, since I start it on the first day of fall), I played a good number of games too:

1. Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs - This was the follow-up to the original Amnesia: The Dark Descent game that was a horror hit back in like 2012 or so. The sequel was only meh. I wasn't gripped by the storyline and found the mechanics tiresome. The entire thing was very predictable too, with stale, tropey scares included.
2. The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes - A very cool horror game that mixed dialog choices with a few point-and-click adventure exploration sections and some quicktime action sequences. Really loved the story, and enjoyed it pretty much the whole way through. The setting, during the Second Iraq War, was interesting and unique too, compared to the traditional haunted house environments in most horror games.
3. Off-Peak - Not really a horror game, just a weird game by Cosmo D, the same guy who made The Norwood Suite, a game I played a few years ago and greatly enjoyed. Very short, since it was free, and definitely felt like a practice run for the other game. I will eventually buy his other games, Tales from Off-Peak City Vol. 1 and Betrayal at Club Low.
4. Scorn - Here we go. This was a somewhat highly anticipated game that I put off buying due to mixed reviews, but finally grabbed when it went about 60% off. The visuals were of course the centerpiece, and generally incredible, but some of the gameplay mechanics sucked, especially in the middle sections of the game where there were too many enemies to comfortably avoid. I even got stuck in a respawn loop where I was being attacked before the screen even lit up from blackness. Was tough to get out of that spot. And the ending was just... bleh. But again, the environments were amazing at times, and I did enjoy exploring the world. Was definitely disappointing in some ways though.
5. Selene ~Apoptosis~ - Just kind of a weird horrorish visual novel. Didn't feel much about it, but had it in my library because it was free. I can't really remember much of the story, which says a lot. It mainly involved some sexy cat demon girl. I dunno.
6. The Shrouded Isle - Very stylish game about managing a cult on an isolated village. The main gimmick was that you had to sacrifice someone every season. Getting the best results from that required finding the "sinners" and executing them, and keeping the five families happy by balancing the executions. If any family became too upset for too long, you yourself would be killed. It was kind of fun for a while, but it became obvious it was a hardcore, grindy numbers game that didn't allow much wiggle room for mistakes. It got a bit tiresome after a while. I think I only made it through the entire game once, and we still failed because one of the virtues wasn't high enough.

Whew. Next up: Extra Life 2023, in the order I played them:

1. Old Man's Journey- Another stylish puzzle game that involved, as you might guess, navigating an old man on a journey to visit his estranged wife before she dies. The central mechanic is manipulating the 2D background to create paths he can use to progress through the regions. Mostly very easy, but a few tricky spots. Decently fun, with a distinctive art style.
2. RiffTrax- A game based on the video series of the same name, where you make up jokes about scenes from movies. The quality can be all over the place, depending on what scenes you get to work with, and who else is playing. Played it with mostly preteens who weren't that clever, sadly.
3. Loco Official - A Roblox game that's a ripoff of Unowith some modifications. Moderately entertaining.
4. A Juggler's Tale - Another Limbo clone. In this one, you're a puppet girl who eventually breaks free from her strings. It had a super-annoying sequence early on where I got all screwed up with the game mechanics, trying to throw a ball at a circus bear or something. I almost set the computer on fire doing that. But as I progressed, it got somewhat better, although there were a few other spots with goofy stealth sequences. A lot of timed puzzles in it. Not horrible, but not great.
5. Out of Line - Another puzzle platformer. I really had a type for this year. This one had pretty charming graphics, and a very thin story. The setting was an alien world where some kind of machines imprisoned all these little guys, and you, a little guy that hadn't been captured, had to set things right. It was pretty fun though, with a few relatively straightforward game mechanics. I cruised through it in a little under four hours. Probably my favorite of the three side-scrollers I played over that weekend.
6. The First Tree - A third-person, 3D vaguely puzzlish platformer where you control a fox exploring environments while reliving a guy's memories. Really tried to hit the feels hard, but it wasn't that compelling for me personally. By the end I just wanted it to be over.
7. Drawful 2 - Goofy party game where you draw funny pictures based on prompts. It was only three of us though, and it's a the-more-the-merrier type of game.

Then for Christmas, the big game I got into was Grounded, a multiplayer survival crafting game that's basically a gamified version of the old movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Pretty dang fun, with satisfying progression and cool environments. The base-building was also a lot of fun. It was my easy Christmas Crack 2023 winner. Unfortunately my companions tired of it, leaving me to mostly play alone, which wasn't as fun.

Okay, that's going to have to be sufficient for 2023. Next up: 2024!

Still trying to catch up, so let's take a trip nine months back in time.

The big game we all got for 2022 was Deep Rock Galactic, and it's the winner of my Christmas Crack 2022 award. Really really fun game, but way more fun with a group than solo with the helper bot. I did end up getting a little burned out with it playing solo after everyone else stopped playing with me. I didn't want to play with strangers. Still, a good time overall.

I did also play a ton of Cosmoteer before Christmas, so it could have been the winner if DRG hadn't come along. It was pretty entertaining, but as often happens with the nearly endless games, I got bogged down and had to ease off. Definitely a lot of promise, since it was still early access at the time, and I think still is.

I guess that's really it for Christmas. I need to recap the last few years of Christmas Crack, since I last posted a full list about five years ago.

• 2018: Banner Saga 3
• 2019: no winner
• 2020: Cyberpunk 2077
• 2021: no winner
• 2022: Deep Rock Galactic

Ugh, that's terrible. 2021 I specifically said there was no winner, and I never even mentioned anything about 2019. I went back through my Steam purchases and couldn't find anything I remember as being especially cracky that year. Astroneer was the closest thing, and I did enjoy it, but I didn't get addicted to it really. And I did play some Spintires and MudRunner after getting DLC for both that year. But meh. Too bad. I need to make sure I have a solid candidate this year!

I guess that's it for this entry. I'll make a new one for 2023 stuff.

It's already been another three months, but I'm back to recap Extra Life 2022. Here are the games we played.

• Unheard - This is an interesting and unique game in which you watch a scene unfold from a top-down blueprint-style view. You can hear all the conversations that take place across multiple rooms in the scene, and watch the speakers move from place to place. The idea is to figure out who all the voices are, and figure out who took which actions, especially who committed the crimes. It took just a few hours to beat, but was pretty fun. The whole family joined in at times. I wish it had been longer in fact.
• Rain World - This is a sort of puzzle platformer in a very complicated environment. It was somewhat interesting, but became too frustrating for me to play it much. My older kid played this more than I did.
• Journey - This was hailed as an absolutely life-changing experience in video games when it came out, but I just couldn't get into it. I found the environments dull and didn't enjoy wandering around, and the controls seemed obtuse. You'd think it would be right up my alley, but no. Didn't like it at all. It actually annoyed me quite a bit. I ended up refunding the game after barely fifteen minutes, in fact.
• Ultimate Chicken Horse - This is a mainstay of Extra Life. We've probably played it every other year or so.
• Paper Beast - This is another weird game that seems designed to play in VR, but I muddle through with my mouse and keyboard. You basically wander through surreal environments triggering various entities, shapes, and creatures to do things like morph, eat each other, and overcome barriers of all type and description. It was intriguing, but I didn't complete it. My younger kid liked it quite a bit.
• Filament - A third-person puzzle game in which you move a little light bulb through chambers attempting to power everything up. It starts out simply enough, but gets devilishly difficult later on. I didn't complete it, but played a few dozen levels, and enjoyed it.
• Overcooked - Another staple of Extra Life, and another one that's extremely tough in the later levels. My kids still haven't mastered it lol.
• Unmemory - This one is sort of like a text adventure, but it adds in visual elements that can be interacted with. You end up scrolling back and forth through text and messing with images and other pieces of media to advance the story. And it's a weird story involving amnesia and/or mistaken identity. I didn't finish it and forget a lot of the details now, but it was decent. I might revisit it someday. Maybe for Extra Life 2023.

We also played multiplayer stalwarts Overcooked and Ultimate Chicken Horse.

And I guess that was it! My favorite game was definitely Unheard, with Filament probably coming in second.

That's it for this entry. I will try to return soon to get into the end of the year action for 2022. I'm only 7-8 months behind now!

Wow, look at me. Only three days since my last post, and I have actually followed up on my promise and returned for more game blogging. I'm going to focus on last Halloween only for this one.

On Steam I played four games:

1. Dagon is essentially just a walking simulator based on the H.P. Lovecraft short story of the same name. I'm almost certain I've read it before, but I must say, playing it as a "game" really brought things home in a way the text never did. Actually getting to visit the strange island dredged up from the bowels of the Pacific Ocean, and seeing the strange creatures, was pretty cool. And the ending was definitely scarier, since I was the guy who was writing the journal entries. And it was free, so big ups all around.
2. Forgive Me Father is a comic-book styled FPS, which I thought might be fun, but ended up being annoying and nauseating. There seemed to be lore in the game, but I never felt like I had time to read it before more zombies were attacking me. And the combat was frenetic but unsatisfying. I barely played it before losing interest completely. I left a negative review, and the game developer replied, saying there are cut scenes between levels that give the main story and hit the Lovecraftian elements a lot more, but meh, the gameplay itself wasn't fun, so I probably won't go back to it any time soon, if ever.
3. Lust for Darkness was another Lovecraftian game, but this was more of a first-person puzzler: not quite at Myst-levels of difficulty, but no walking simulator either. The basic story is that you're a man whose wife disappeared a year ago suddenly, and who then sends you a message saying she's been abducted by a freaky sex/death cult. You're supposed to go and save her. It has a lot of creepy creatures, but also a lot of weird orgies and such. It had a goofy twist at the end too, but I overall enjoyed it. There was some side-quest type content, but I never got around to playing that stuff. Maybe this October.
4. The Norwood Suite - This one was more weird than scary, but I'm counting surreal and psychedelic stuff as fitting content for my horror theme. It was a relatively short sort of adventure game that mostly revolved around fetch quests, but the characters and setting were pretty interesting, and the music was good too, so I liked it. The ending was total wtf nonsense, but the game was all about the journey as opposed to getting anywhere in particular.

On GOG, I played Strangeland, a point-and-click adventure game that has horror elements but also hits the surreal angle pretty hard. It wasn't too difficult; I only got really stuck once I think. The story was decently interesting, but it was pretty short, and it was possible to get all the different endings by changing just the final choice. The environment, a busted up old carnival, was nicely creepy and bizarre, and there were a good number of disgusting things I had to do to progress. The game in general was reminiscent of the late 90s point-and-click adventure Sanitarium.

I also tried Kona on Amazon Gaming, and it was very meh. I only played a little before getting annoyed with not being able to find something and getting confusing prompts from the game, and then found out the ending basically sucks, so I skipped out on it.

On Epic, I played In Sound Mind, a kind of first-person puzzle/shooter horror hybrid. It was pretty good, though not perfect. The shooter aspects actually got annoying in some places, as it became something of a hassle to defeat enemies, especially since I never found the shotgun, so was a bit underpowered in places. Luckily, there was a way to despawn enemies by running to certain locations, and the story and settings (a variety of dream worlds based on the fears of the protagonist mental patients) were pretty cool. In fact, it was probably my favorite game of the event. I also tried Saturnalia, a weirdly animated game set in a small town where some kind of nightmarish monster comes out of a hole or cave and hunts down the people in the town. Apparently you get to control multiple characters, and are pretty much guaranteed to lose them all to the monster eventually. Bizarrely, the game is something of a roguelike, where you get to play again after everyone dies, but the city rearranges itself each time, which sounds like a pain in the ass, since it's a mazelike place to start with. It spent a ton of time setting up the backstories of the characters and tasking you with mundane activities, and then when the creature appeared it was pretty jolting. But overall, I couldn't get into it, and didn't spend much time on it.

It was a decent assortment of games overall, and I also watched the TV shows and movies to stay on theme, but those aren't for this journal. Next update will be about Extra Life 2022 and Christmas! And this ended up being four days after the last post, because it took me an entire day to write it lol.

I can't believe it's already been almost eight months since my last post. I really should do a better job of updating. I even promised to update sooner last time, and failed. Terrible

Thankfully, Steam started a new year-end summary thing called Steam Replay 2022, so that helps me see what I did a bit. Apparently, I played 115 games last year, which is in the top 0.3% of all players! Of course, 53 of those were demos, but still. It did check out a huge variety of games, but rarely got deeply invested in anything for long.

I never finished Infra. It was kind of cool, but also kind of slow, and I think I got stuck possibly. It's been so long I'm not sure what state I left the game in, but I got sick of it one way or another. I did play and complete The Station in August, which was decent, but not incredible. The plot revolved around exploring a seemingly abandoned space station and figuring out what happened. It was pretty short, and the twist (we're the aliens!) was pretty meh, but I can't say I didn't enjoy parts of it.

I also played Rifftrax: The Game for the first time in July. It's a fun but slightly flawed game. The premise is that a group of players watch short clips from old movies, then come up with a joke to replace the regular dialog. Everyone writes their joke, submits it, then everyone votes on the best jokes. You win by making people laugh essentially. I'm pretty decent at it, but playing it with my younger relatives, most of whom aren't quite as clever as me, made it less entertaining than it could be. A lot of potential in it though, and we did have fun (and laugh).

Another new game I bought and played in August was Necesse, which is sort of a top-down Terraria style game. The setting is a world full of islands that you can explore and build bases or towns on. You can also use ladders to go underground to deeper and deeper layers to fight monsters and find cool treasures. It's also somewhat like Stardew Valley and similar farming games, because you can plant crops and stuff, but even better, it's like a base-builder or city management game, because you can get people to live in your towns and assign them jobs, and they'll start to automate all the grindy work for you. It's still in early access, and seems a bit slim on content, but I had a good amount of fun with it. I did eventually get a little tired of it and set it aside though, of course. I should take another look at it soon and see what state it's in. It's also multiplayer, so could be a lot more fun with friends.

Also in August, I played The Looker, which was a short and goofy The Witness parody game that was also free. It had a few sorta puzzles, but most of them were gimmicky jokes. Some of the audio logs and content were actually interesting and funny though. It was worth playing for free, for sure.

I'm going to just stop there for now. I'll write more entries soon, and this time I mean it! Next up will be last year's Halloween Horror games.

So, [current year]. What have I been up to?

In January, I played a game called Laraan, which was a meh 3D platformer that I think I got stuck in at one point. Or I got bored with it. Probably won't ever finish it. I also played a ton of Crusader Kings II with my best game as Poland yet. I actually created the Wendish Empire for the first time ever. I didn't quite finish that campaign either though, as things were getting a bit tedious. Starting in early February over a period of a couple months I played RecRoom on and off with my kids, and that was alright.

Steam had a big demo event in February, and I played a handful of demos. Some sucked, like Occupy Mars, but a few were decent. The Wandering Village and The Tribe Must Survive, in particular, were both intriguing management games with interesting gimmicks. In the former, you're on the back of a giant creature traveling the countryside, and must tend its well-being alongside the well-being of your people. In the latter, you manage a small group trying to survive after some cataclysmic event. I played both of them through the entire demo. The Wandering Village might edge out as more compelling overall, as it stopped right when thing were about to get crazy, and I was applying all the skills I'd learned along the way. The Tribe Must Survive felt a lot more unpolished, with significant issues in the resource gathering and movement speeds, and an utterly unfair "long night" event that practically wiped out my entire tribe.

In March, I completed the very short new Valve game, Aperture Desk Job, which perfectly preserved the style and humor of Portal 2. They really need to make another full-size adventure already. Half-Life Alyx doesn't count. I also finally tried Undertale, but couldn't get into it. In late March, I tried a new idea: plowing through my library in alphabetical order, playing only games I'd never tried. That went fairly well, actually.

I played:

• 100% Orange Juice - A weird card/board game that was okay but got old quickly.
• 16-Bit Trader - Absolutely horrible, unplayable economic sim. You just lose money continuously, and there's simply no way to get ahead. Awful.
• 198X - A short pixel art style game that all about the nostalgia vibe. It included homages to five classic genres of the time, and a basic framing story. The music and art were really what carried the game. I'm glad I experienced it.
• 12 is Better Than 6 - A top-down shooter that was better than okay, but not amazing. I played through the first chapter or two and moved on. Might go back to it some day.
• 200% Mixed Juice - A visual novel based on the characters from 100% Orange Juice. Meh.
• Abducted - A promising sci-fi adventure game that I stopped playing because it was never completed.
• Abyss Odyssey - Actually pretty decent roguelike side-scrolling adventure game that had fairly complex combat more like a fighting game.
• Almost There - A crappy action puzzle platformer that quickly became frustrating.
• A-Men - A weird sort of puzzle platformer that was also sort of like the old Lemmings games. Terrible puzzle design made me lose interest after the first couple levels.
• Arid - A sort of okay survival game about getting out of the desert after a plane crash. I couldn't get into it though.
• Between Two Castles - Another horrible game that pretty much broke near the end of the tutorial.
• Beyond Eyes - A lovely and sad game about a girl looking for her lost cat. I cried.

I think I bailed out on the idea at that point. 198X, 12 is Better Than 6, Abyss Odyssey, and Beyond Eyes combined to make me feel like the project wasn't a waste of time. I'll probably do it again at some point, since I still have dozens or hundreds of unplayed games.

In April, I did point-and-click adventures, again, but barely played anything. I completed Kathy Rain and Technobabylon, both of which were pretty good but not fantastic. Both suffered from weird endings that became jumbled and confused. Kathy Rain I thought was going to be more of a detective story, and it was in the early going, but it got all supernatural, which didn't exactly work. Technobabylon had some cool sci-fi themes, but the ending where one choice was the "good" one and the other was "bad" seemed arbitrary. Still, there were worthwhile, with solid art design and puzzles that mostly made sense.

In mid-May, I played Raft with my brother, nephews, and sons. It's okay, but not amazing. What was amazing was Subnautica, which I started in May and completed in early June. I'd given it a go back in November of 2019, but stopped playing partway through due to serious motion sickness issues caused by a combination of the game, medicine for wisdom tooth pain, and an ear infection. This time I got all the way through it, and loved it. There's not a ton of story, but what story there is is really well done and revealed in just the right amount of tantalizing tidbits. I did use some maps towards the end of the game just to make sure I wasn't wasting a lot of time getting lost, but other than that just went at it straight. Probably the most satisfying game I've played in a while.

After that, wanting to keep the good vibes going, I tried playing the Echoes of the Eye DLC for Outer Wilds again. It was very disappointing. In the early going, it had some of the same magical sense of adventure and exploration, but the latter parts had too much stealth and horror that became maddeningly frustrating. I used a mod to light up certain areas and it was still a bit challenging. It honestly kind of ruined my love of the original game a little with its poor design. Some of the music was good though, and the little summary of my adventures in with the vision staff or whatever it's called was pretty great.

In mid-June there was a free-play weekend for The Anacrusis, a team-based shooter that is pretty much an exact clone of Left 4 Dead, only with a sci-fi spaceship setting and mutant aliens instead of zombies. Played it with my sons and we had a decent time, but I don't know that it's distinct enough to actually buy, when we can still have fun playing L4D and L4D2, both of which we all already own.

Next up, Steam had another big demo event, and I went into it whole hog this time. Rather than repeat myself, I'll just link to the Twitter thread I posted on it. Highlights: played a couple dozen games, many were junk, but a few were quite good. Ghost Song, a Metroidvania game with a cool sci-fi setting, Brotato, a twin-stick shooter with only one stick, Old Skies, a solid Wadjet Eye point-and-click adventure game with an interesting time travel storyline, and One Dreamer, a game about making a game where you modify pseudocode to solve puzzles, in particular are games I will probably end up buying at some point. I also separately played the Attack on Titan 2 demo, which was pretty cool and portrays the experience of flying around with ODM gear quite well. Only problem is the game itself is sixty bucks and doesn't seem to go on sale, so I probably won't be buying it any time soon, if ever.

Immediately on the heels of that, Steam had its Summer Sale, which overlapped slightly with the GOG Summer Sale, which started about a week and a half earlier. I took a hard look at my wishlists and finally made a few purchases. Wildermyth was the first. It's an RPG with a twist: instead of one big story that you play and complete with your characters essentially the same at the end as when they began, you create a group of heroes who age and change over time. In fact your can eventually play as the children of your original heroes. I beat a couple of campaigns in it and enjoyed myself, but decided to take a break after that. I'll definitely go back to it at some point though. The funny thing is I debated whether to buy it on GOG or Steam, but then discovered it was more deeply discount on IndieGala, so bought it there, for Steam.

From GOG, I bought Loom and Lost Horizons, in anticipation of Summer of Adventure 2022, which I planned for July. From Steam, I bought Infra and The Station, also for that event, even though they're not technically in the point-and-click genre, which has been the focus of this monthly theme since I started it. But they're close enough.

Oh, and that gets us to the current month, July. I completed Loom, which was fun, but as I mentioned about Gabriel Knight, I inadvertently played the "remake" version instead of the original. Because of their obsession with having voice recordings of all the conversations on the CD-ROM at the time, they had to cut about 20% of the dialog. And unlike the original, which had music constantly playing in the background, the remake only has music playing during dialog sequences, because they could only play a single audio file at a time. Overall they kind of screwed up the game, but it was still good. The voice acting was actually pretty good, for all that. Lost Horizons was really great, with a wonderful Indiana-Jones-style adventure: Nazis, powerful artifacts, magical worlds, all that stuff. It's one of the best point-and-clicks I've played in a while.

I'm currently playing Infra, which is a strange bird. In it, you are a public works safety inspector or some such, who goes out to an dam to check on its state of repair. It's something of a puzzle adventure, but it's also vaguely horrorish, with creepy environments and apparently a couple minor jump scares. I don't know how far I have to go in it, but I'm mostly enjoying it. I have to take breaks to avoid getting too motion sick during extended indoor sequences.

And that brings us to today. I am going to try and finish Infra and The Station before the end of the month, and if there's time, maybe some other games, then just play whatever until October, when I'll get into the horror genre again. I've already got a decent list of games planned out for that. One possible biggie that hasn't come out yet is Scorn, a grotesque, surreal, sci-fi horror game with an art style that closely mimics H.R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński. I'm planning to buy it maybe a day before its release date of October 21, then check reviews and decide whether or not to keep and play it or refund it if it turns out to be a bomb.

So far, though, I don't think I have anything special ready for Extra Life, so I'll need to start researching that. Last year worked out really well, so I'll try to find more beautiful games that are not first person, to avoid making the viewers motion sick.

I promise to update sooner next time too! Hopefully between those two events. Cheers.

I consistently put off updating this blog until I have a huge backlog of content to discuss. I guess it's okay since I'm only writing this for myself, and as far as I know not a single other human has ever read any of it. With that bit of whining out of the way, let us, the editorial us, get into it.

First, a brief follow-up on the last thing I was talking about in my last post. Star Control II absolutely stinks. I don't understand what all the hype is about. The space combat is awful, and the story didn't hook me at all. It's just about unplayable, I have nothing but regret about buying it and attempting to play it.

October Horror 2021

Blameless - This was a very short game that I beat in less than an hour. It was free, I think, and not very good. Basically you were wrongly accused of a crime and had to escape the crime scene before the real killer got you.

Cayne - This was a free side story from the longer Stasis, which I played a few years ago. It had the same sci-fi setting and ultra-disgusting storyline and characters, but it wasn't as good as the main game. Lots of illogical puzzles and backtracking, and a predictable finish.

Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father - This is a very old (mid-90s) Sierra adventure game that I never got around to playing at the time of its release. If I'd realized it had Tim Curry and Mark Hamill voicing characters, I would've jumped at it. Unfortunately, this was the modern remake of the game that features newer graphics and, inexplicably, an entirely new voice cast. I honestly thought the voice work stunk, so I ended up turning it off shortly after I began, and that made the game more tolerable. It had pretty sensible puzzles and a decent story. One of the better old school adventure games for sure.

Little Nightmares - This is a somewhat short puzzle platformer game in the style of Limbo and others: tiny child has to navigate huge, scary world. But it has a twist where you, the girl, end up being just as scary as anything else in the game.

Simulacra - This game is about finding a random smart phone belonging to a missing girl and trying to track her down. It's part of a newish genre of "found phone" horror games. It was so-so. Kind of better in the mid-game and then the ending was silly.

The Town of Light - This is a horror game that's more about the real-life horror of early 20th century psychiatric hospitals, which often caused as much or more damage to mentally ill people as they had coming in. It particularly focuses on the nightmare of the lobotomy, the severing of two sections of brain that "cured" people of various conditions. In fact you get to experience it first hand. Pretty depressing game, but not bad.

Extra Life 2021

I specifically went out of my way to pick games that I thought would be entertaining to watch, either because of interesting stories or beautiful art design.

Gorogoa - This is a really clever puzzle game where you shuffle through sections of images, zooming in and out on multiple levels of reality. It was quite short, only a couple hours or so, but perfect for streaming and really fun to play as a group. The graphics are simple yet captivating.

Gris - This is a fair to decent puzzle platformer that features lovely visuals and pretty solid music. It was something of an indie darling upon its release due to people viewing it as having themes about mental illness, but with no dialog or text whatsoever, I'd say it's open to interpretation. It was also pretty short, beatable in a few hours.

Nelly Cootalot and the Fowl Fleet - This is a pretty funny point-and-click adventure I'd been eyeing for a while, and decided to get, again, specifically for Extra Life. It features Tom Baker of Doctor Who as one of the characters, and it was a joy to hear his rich, redolent voice again.

I also played a little bit of Ultimate Chicken Horse with the boys, and attempted the play the Outer Wilds DLC: Echoes of the Eye, but couldn't get into it at the time. More on that later.

Christmas 2021

I got a few new games, but sadly, none of them were really worthy of a Christmas Crack Award. This if the first time I've not had anything truly grab me over the holidays in a long while.

Barotrauma - This is a pretty fun multiplayer side-scrolling horror/exploration game. You pilot a submarine through the underground oceans of Europa looking for treasures and such, while trying to avoid the horrors of the deep. I played it some with my sons and cousins, but we haven't played it much in a few months. It has something of a steep learning curve.

Dyson Sphere Program - Considering how much I enjoyed Satisfactory, I thought this would be a slam dunk. But it ended up feeling like more of a hassle than a pleasure, and I gave up on it fairly early. It's a top-down factory base builder that is almost like an RTS in presentation. I might start over from scratch at some point and see if I can get into it, but I have so many choices these days, it seems unwise to force myself to play something I don't enjoy.

SnowRunner - This is another one that I thought I'd love, but it didn't quite grab me like Spintires and MudRunner did years ago. If I've got to pick, this was the closest anything got to Christmas Crack levels, and I'll probably just give it the award to keep the streak going. But while it does add more content like quests to delivery specific combinations of supplies, which sometimes unlocks shorter routes, and lots of options for vehicle upgrades, not having access to them all at the beginning makes it tough to manage everything, and there are almost too many choices. I feel like I could get stuck micromanaging my options forever instead of just driving. And the driving doesn't feel quite as good as in previous games.

I haven't been playing a ton of games over the summer, but I've played a few.

I bought a tiny puzzle game called Press Ctrl that is exactly what the name implies. You have to move a little guy over on top of a Ctrl button. But after you do that, you have to move him over to a set of arrow keys to move another, smaller guy onto another Ctrl button. And then that smaller guy has to move onto yet another set of arrow keys, still controlled by the bigger guy pressing his arrow keys while being controlled by you pressing your keys. And it goes a couple layers deeper! There are only 4-5 levels, and the last level is a repeat of the first with yet another, fifth layer of guy. It's incredibly difficult. But I beat the whole thing in about three hours.

I put some more time in Satisfactory fiddling around with my mega base. I also have dropped probably 10-20hrs playing good old Team Fortress 2 in the last month or so. I went digging into the achievements and specifically tried to pick up some of them, with moderate success. I think I got about a dozen new achievements.

For my birthday I got the recently released Starflight: Tales from the Starport Lounge short stories compilation book and have been reading that, which got me in the mood to play the actual game(s). So I beat Starflight 2: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula over the course of the last week or two. I was going to go back and play the first game, but I think instead, for now, I'm going to try Star Control II, which is widely considered one of the best games of all time and is a spiritual successor to those two games. I never even heard of it back in the day as far as I can remember, although I've been aware of it now for maybe a decade or so, and I've had the game for a couple months on GOG.

October Horror is starting in just a few days, and I've got a solid list of games planned for it. Then Extra Life 2021, my EIGHTH year, is next, in early November, and then hopefully some good times in December.

Well, I already wrote this entire thing up once, but somehow didn't save it, and it was wiped out. So I'm going to do it all over again. Argh.

First things first: I built The Man Machine in early September, and it is glorious. Right out of the gate, I got into Death Stranding, which is very cool, with an interesting setting and some different game mechanics. I sort of got bogged down in the side quests though, which are a ton of delivery missions, and got a little burned out on it. So I switched over to Kingdom Come: Deliverance and played that for a couple weeks, but then stopped once it was time for October Horror.

Games list for that:

• Alien: Isolation - High-quality survival horror game set in the xenomorph universe. I only went through the first couple sections and never mixed it up with the alien.
• Alpha Polaris - Nice little point-and-click horror adventure game set in Greenland. Had some Lovecraftian vibes and decent puzzles.
• Narcosis - A creepy first-person underwater base exploration game in the vein of SOMA, with a quality twist at the end.
• Showdown Bandit - Garbage game with an interesting aesthetic but crappy mechanics. Developers abandoned it and I stopped playing it partway through.

I can't remember if I played anything significant in November, as Extra Life was something of a bust last year. I only played a little of Alien: Isolation as a leftover from October, and then a good amount of Awesomenauts, which I still get into every few months for a while. Wait, I take that back. I played Assassin's Creed: Valhalla for maybe five hours. It was okay, not mind-blowing. And once it got to the part where the mid-east assassin's show up to train your Viking character, I lost interest.

But in December, woo baby, the big news was Cyberpunk 2077. I pre-ordered that (the first time I'd done that since Portal 2 more than a decade ago) and played the hell out of it. I'm giving it my Christmas Crack Award for 2020. Of course there was a lot of controversy because last-gen consoles were sucking wind trying to play it, but with my new PC, I had no issues beyond a few minor glitches that didn't really affect gameplay. I put about 80hrs into it, and decided to take a break for the new year.

I got Satisfactory for Christmas, and that was my go-to game all of January. It's still in early-access, but I still enjoyed building conveyor belt spaghetti, and unlocked all the production tiers, although I didn't actually use the very top level stuff like nuclear power. Then it was time to set that one aside too. I tried to give Outer Wilds, which I'd heard great things about, a chance next, but the controls (specifically using a game controller) were frustrating and I dropped it after an hour. But after asking for some sci-fi game recommendations and having it mentioned yet again, I went back to it and fell in love. It's now in my top games ever. Beautiful, moving story, ingenious time-loop concept, and a world that just begs to be explored.

Following up on that sci-fi kick, which had come from reading 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time, I decided to make the next theme month March to Mars. I didn't have a ton of options, but this is what I came up with:

• Surviving Mars - Sort of a base-building, factory game set on the Red Planet. It seemed complicated and slow, and I couldn't really get into it.
• Offworld Trading Company - Fairly similar, but more of an economic sim. I had a bit more fun with this one, but still only put maybe ten hours into it.
• The Long Journey Home - Ugh. The idea of flying across the galaxy to get back to the Earth sounds neat. Conceptually this could be fun, but it's ruined by horrible horrible game mechanics, specifically the spaceflight and planet-lander sequences, which are like 2/3 of the total gameplay. Really annoying, because I kept pushing through trying to enjoy it, and I just didn't.
• Kerbal Space Program - I hadn't played this in about five years, and wanted to scratch that rocket-building itch, even though this has essentially no relation to Mars.
• FTL: Faster Than Light - This really should be on the list, but I felt like playing it and dumped some time into it. No connection to Mars either.
• Mars: War Logs - A kind of mid-tier RPG set on Mars, that I enjoyed pretty well. I think I put 20-30hrs into this, but didn't finish it. I'll try to get back to it someday though.

For April, I went with my Adventurous April theme for the second year. I didn't play many, mainly because the first one on the list wasn't fun and I had to struggle through it.

• Shardlight - Post-apocalyptic game with a deadly virus, a vaccine lottery, and face masks? A little too on-the-nose for the current times. I went in blind, and didn't know the story or setting. But man, what a disappointment from Wadjet Eye games, a company that has made some great point-and-clicks. I didn't care about any of the characters, whose motivations were incoherent, and I could not get invested in the story at all. You get one choice at the end of the game that gives you three different endings, and I didn't care. Nothing mattered.
• The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 - Quirky, fun, and funny! I had put off playing this one for years, even though I loved the first one. I think this one was actually better. Great story, wonderful, hilarious characters, gah, it had everything going for it. The only crappy part is it ended on a massive cliffhanger, and it's not clear there will ever be a third part.
• Paradigm - I finished this one off at the end of the month just to get it out of the way. A goofy, overly self-aware game that is an endless fountain of jokes, some of which are funny.

Now it's May, and I'm doing Spring Cleaning again. My idea is basically to go back and finish some of these AAA games I started when I first built The Man Machine. What that's actually amounted to so far is playing a ton of Cyberpunk 2077. Theoretically, I will switch around to Death Stranding and Kingdom Come: Deliverance again, but that hasn't happened yet. But I will probably just extend this event through June. Then in July I might go back to point-and-clicks again.

So that's it! I've been playing a ton of video games since I built the new PC. Everything is buttery smooth and beautiful.

Still living that lockdown life. For Spring Cleaning in May, I finished Gemini Rue and Steamworld Heist. The former was a meh point-and-click and the latter was a pretty fun 2D squad-based side-scrolling turn-based tactical shooter. Blah that's horrible. But essentially you put together a team of robots and attack space ships filled with other robots. You get to plan your shots and take as much time between turns as you want. Your robots level up and get upgraded skills and equipment. It's bright and colorful, like the other Steamworld games, and I liked it quite a bit.

Other than that, I 100%ed Tales From Space: Mutant Blobs Attack and Thomas Was Alone, and got a few more achievements in 140 and LYNE. Pretty low-key for a theme month.

Since then, I've just been randomly playing stuff here and there: The Binding of Isaac, Plague Inc: Evolved, Awesomenauts and Team Fortress 2 are all games I've played in August.

I'm also putting together my list of games for October Horror. So far, I have Alien: Isolation, Alpha Polaris, CAYNE, Claire, and Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location. That last is only a maybe, since I'm not a fan of the series and only got it from a bundle.

But the big new is: I'm building a new computer! I shouldn't have buried the lead, but oh well, that's what happens with stream-of-consciousness journal entries.

Specs:

• AMD RYZEN 7 3700X 8-Core 3.6 GHz (4.4 GHz Max Boost) Socket AM4 processor
• EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER SC ULTRA GPU
• ASUS AM4 TUF GAMING X570-Plus ATX Motherboard
• G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 32GB RAM
• Corsair Force MP600 M.2 2280 1TB PCI-Express Gen 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD
• Cooler Master HAF XB EVO computer case
• Thermaltake Pure A14 140mm Red LED PWM case fan x2
• Antec NeoECO 750W ATX 80 PLUS GOLD Semi-Modular PSU
• A couple of minor-league players to be named later

I have some optional parts being added too, like extra drives and USB ports. But that's the heart and soul of the PC. It's not finished yet, but I'm aiming to have it done next weekend, pending the arrival of the remaining parts. I also got a free copy of Death Stranding with the GPU, and I'll get a free copy of Assassin's Creed: Valhalla with the CPU. So I've got big AAA gaming plans in the future. I gotta, with this new machine. Oh, and it's name? The Man Machine.