xyzzysqrl | Entries tagged with 2023 completes

The final two games of the year are a pair of hidden object games. I've always loved these, they're absolutely junk food and the market is spammed with them but every one of them has its own way to be deeply ridiculous and I appreciate that.

Puss in Boots was like, what if you adopted a cat and that cat dragged you through a galactic portal to cat town and you have to solve all their nonsense because Puss in Boots is trying to stop Christmas from coming? It had a robust postgame which is neat. I approve of that.

Enchanted Express meanwhile was like... "Your brother has been turned into a mouse, is this awesome? Y/Y?" and of course there's no option to leave him like that, so you have to participate in the well-known Christmas tradition of boarding a train and listening to the life stories of three strangers who are also turned into animals and then you fight the narrator for freedom I guess.

Both of these were BAFFLING relics of something and I hope to play a few more hidden objects over the course of the year. The playlist is here.

Normally I'd do an end-of-year post, but I'm probably going to do a summary stream on Twitch instead.

Kenji Miyazawa was an interesting guy. He wrote poems, short stories. He taught agriculture. He played the cello. Also in this SNES walking sim/light RPG, he has an entire town worshiping him and his stories without realizing: THEY'RE IN ONE.

In Ihatovo Monogatari/The Stories of Ihatovo you're a nameless traveler from a distant land who stops by the title town and decides to hang out and collect all of a random stranger's journals because you really have nothing better going on with your life. You watch and lightly participate in several re-enactments of the author's stories. That's pretty much the game, but it felt remarkably fresh and unique. This game feels like it started the kind of genre that later RPGMaker types would delight in making. No combat, just interaction and dialog.

I -mostly- enjoyed this game, although one sour note set me on edge for the entire rest of the playthrough. Unfortunate, but what are you going to do, NOT murder a fox in cold blood because he's smarter than you? Ha ha!

fuck the gods.

Anyway I streamed this and it's on Youtube now.

We... sure are creeping up on the end of the year, huh...

D'you remember Bogo? They did a lot of webcomics, and that one game Lyle in Cube Sector? I hadn't thought of Bogo in many years, 'til Celine streamed Lyle in Cube Sector over on her channel. The way she was talking like the entire site had just fallen off the net made me search it up to see for myself that it was still online, and right on the front page was the announcement for their new game: Corn Kidz 64.

Corn Kidz 64 takes that sort of squishy hyper-exaggerated art style, combines it with absolutely precise controls and a low-resolution Aesthetic, and sends it out into the world with a main campaign that's finishable in about ten hours if you don't mind the difficulty spike larger than the Statue of Liberty that steps in right at the end.

I think this game may have given me a mild RSI and I don't really mind that.

Anyway it's dang good stuff and I had a really good time playing it, although I did not 100% it.

That's watchable on Youtube here.

We Love Katamari etc name cruft is a pretty good. It was a pretty good game when it was originally released, and it's a pretty good game now. If I have an issue with it, it's that it's so much less relaxing than the previous Katamari. Katamari 1 had nice loose timing, so you could relax and still complete goals for the level. WLK is more tightly-timed, you're going to actually fail levels a few times before you can pass them. It also includes the fucking Cowbear level, which is terrible. So it's a good sequel but a slightly worse relaxation game. That's all watchable here.

Ecoquest meanwhile was yet another trip into my misbegotten past as a Sierra enthusiast. Two sessions flew by as we "enjoyed" puns, recycled half the ocean, learned about how much humans absolutely suck, and watched a prog metal album play out between a whale and a mutant manta ray. This was a VERY educational game. Check that out here.

I'm getting really behind on these completes!

Gabriel Knight 3 was the first time I'd played through this one and I'm still kinda reeling from it. Like I honestly don't know how I feel about some of the developments towards the back half of the game. It's very ... well, I can see why the fandom has been going "AND THEN?!!?" for the last dozen years. I finished it off by reading the little teaser story at the end that hinted at GK4 and... welp, that was it. That's all the Gabe there is, until I do the 20th Anni remake of the first game. Playlist here.

Wrath of the Gods was an absolute delight. A 1994 FMV game remastered this year for HD video, playable right on the web. A really good time was had by all. Delightful death screams. Highly recommended. Playlist here.

As for Katamari... it's Katamari. Playlist here.

I'm really getting bad about keeping track of stuff. As well, my review-writing skills feel like they're withering away. A lot of my mental attention is going to the streams lately, which is why there's so many Youtube links around here anymore.

Gabriel Knight 2 is my favorite FMV adventure game ever. I still regard this as one of the best adventure games ever made, in fact. Decent puzzles, good writing, good acting, a lot of great faces... not enough werewolves, though.

Zwei II, or "The Ilvard Insurrection" as they call it in the US, is a pretty solid Falcom game. Just a game with a ton of heart and enthusiasm for the kind of dungeon crawler ARPG it is. I'm very fond of the healing system, where you eat food to heal but also to gain XP, allowing you to underlevel the game if you're doing very well at it.

I've been trying to think of what to say about these two games for a couple days and I'm very tired so I'm just gonna link the videos and be done with it.

D got a single video here.

Gabe Knight 1 gets a whole four video playlist, here.

I wish I had more to say, I particularly love GK1 and playblogged it here before, but this is what I got right now. Low brain month, y'know?

I have to be honest with y'all:
I played through this game, enjoyed it, found the plot far better written than I could hope for, and in spite of it being a centerpiece of the plot, I do not have any idea what the "Crusade of Centy" was.

It's a good game, though. Sort of "the Zelda we have at home", sort of "The Undertale we have at home", only far more linear and with fewer secrets I noticed. (Doesn't mean they weren't there.)

Good game, underrated, it's like $500 on eBay so don't buy it on eBay. Just emulate it instead, obviously.

Or watch it here.

Being a superhero is a power fantasy: you get power and you use it to help people. If you have no power but you help people anyway in spite of the laws against it, they call you a villain.
That's the launching point for Penny's crimes: Not terrorism or chaos, but attacks on society itself.

Okay sometimes there's a little chaos.

Penny Larceny's a VN from Fiction Factory Games, writers of beloved classic Arcade Spirits and probably-classic Arcade Spirits: The New Challengers which I still need to play someday. The premise is that Penny, whom you share a head with, is a henchie-for-hire for one of three endearing villains, all of whom are in it against the world and need a buddy to back them up.

You select three from a large menu of crimes to commit, select your boss, and set out upon an adventure. Unlike a lot of VNs out there, there's no failstates here. You will always succeed, the tale will simply twist and turn harder if you pick options that temporarily set you back. You can either 5-star your missions like a perfect thief, or aim for the (surprisingly more difficult) zero-stars of total chaos. Either way, Penny pulls through.

So that's the base overview but the true charm of PLGES (let's not call it that actually) is in the writing and characterization. Nobody's a dry cliche here, everyone has interesting hidden depths and a meaningful story to uncover. Some of them cause genuine emotional impact damage, others are just a fun ride. And what if you could somehow help everyone?

Playing and streaming through this game was a fantastic time and my new goal in life is to make sure this thing sells well enough to get a teased continuation. Friends, do not make me sad. Pick this one up today or sooner.

Oh, right, yeah. I finished the latest giant-ass Bethsoft game.

Honestly it's ... good at being the kind of game Bethesda makes, and I ignored all the parts I didn't like. Had a good time.

I streamed the whole thing, as usual. Here it is.

I've always found the Mega Man Legends fandom a little irritating. There's this group of people who really desperately want sequels to these Playstation games, and Capcom really DID screw them over, but man the games can't possibly be that good can they?

Yeah they can. IN A WORLD COVERED BY ENDLESS WATER somebody cranked out the best Mega Man game I've ever played, a 3D adventure game with dungeon crawling and NPCs with genuine personalities and cool story arcs and heart-filled sidequests and of course The Bonne Family, air pirates so goofycool ineffectual that they got their own spinoff game.

I too now want a third Mega Man Legands game and I haven't played the second yet. I did play Adventures of Tron Bonne and that's cool, and I'll be playing it again for the stream, but... man, dang, I loved this and I suddenly GET IT. I get the Bonne fandom, I get the Servbot fandom, I get it all.

Capcom, at least do a trilogy release of these games. Let people see what they're missing.

Maybe modernize the controls a bit, though. They do take Adjustment.

Twitch playlist link goes here.

A lovely game about painting landscapes with sloshy glorpy noises and having clinical depression. In a world where every character and place is named after food, your little self-insert dog gets a magical brush that can color the suddenly-colorless world. Lots of fun paint tricks and meditations on the meaning of art and what it does for and to people follow.

If you've ever been a suffering creative or just felt lost about where your life is going, Chicory will probably speak to you. I found it lovely, if a little preachy at times. Yes, it's an Indie Game About Depression but cliches are cliche for a reason and this one did everything it does very well.

Also halfway through the finale stream I managed to flail so hard trying to engage with a plot revelation that I accidentally cut the stream off. So it was doing something right.

Anyway, playlist over here. Enjoy!

Uhhhh oops! Ha ha! I totally forgot some of these existed! I didn't make playlists in a timely fashion!

I beat Syberia 3 about a month ago and that means I've forgotten much of it. Still, it's sort of the misbegotten child of the series. Everyone seems to hate it deeply, and it was... frankly, a buggy and janky mess. But it had HEART, dangit, and I respect that and really enjoyed the game. I did not enjoy the control scheme. I'm lookin' forward to Syberia 4 at some point in the future. -- Playlist Link

Abzu I've played before. It's still absolutely beautiful, an underwater festival for the eyes and ears. The whole stream loved it and I'm really sad it ended in under two hours. It's just one video.

Hypnagogia and its sequel were technically the first "horror" games I've covered on the channel, although no one found them terribly horrific. Lovely low-poly indie titles from a dev called SodaRaptor, I immediately bought their latest game, "Interior Worlds", for streaming and personal pleasure later in the year. You can find that playlist here.

Whew.
So yeah that slipped because of Demofest and my own distraction. Oops. At least I THINK I'm caught up now.

Live-a-Live is a 1994 SNES game that asks the question "What if this video game were actually at least seven different video games?" A celebration of genre fiction that offers you the choice of playing a wild west cowboy movie, a tense sci-fi thriller, Street Fighter 2, Ninja Undertale, or a bunch of other small RPGs. There's even an unlockable! Ha ha!

I've been intimidated by this game for a long time. I didn't really get the battle system and I didn't really understand what it was doing. When I threw caution to the wind and bought the shiny remake on PC, I expected to maybe get a couple scenarios in, have an okay time, back out and shrug. It was okay, as long as I liked part of it, that was good enough.

I LOVED this damn game. Holy crap this is a masterpiece. I not only played every scenario including the unlockable, I finished every superboss and everything it was possible to do, bar a couple of minor achievements. I might go back for them, I am ENTHUSED about 100%ing this thing actually.

Part of the good and the heartful about these streams I'm doing is that I'm pushing myself to try out games I just... never got to before. (I say this on an evening when I'm playing the crap out of Skyrim. Shhh.) Live-a-Live is a great triumph of RPG design and I can't say enough good about its music, its battle system, its scenario writing, the emotional heft of it all.

As always, there's a playlist over here on Youtube.

It's always hard to write about a murder mystery without salting spoilers into the paragraph, but Paradise Killer deserves going in with as few details as possible. A vaporwavey, neon-soaked open-island adventure where the longer you hang around, the more you realize something is deeply and intensely wrong with every aspect of the society that lives there.

If Suda51's games did not exist, this game would be radically different and a total shadow of itself, but the shadow cast by Suda51's career does not fully overlap the potential of Paradise Killer. It has its own light, different and distinct.

It's also wordy as hell and I did not solve every single mystery on the island because my throat was giving out. I have several visual novel style games in the near future. Pray for my vocal cords, my adoring public.

I streamed the crap out of this game and as always I've put a playlist together. You're welcome.

Yep, I beat this back in 2016 which is... whoof, almost ten years ago, don't ask me where time goes.

Uhhh...

It's still great!

Yeah, that's it. It's a fantastic game, I love it, I'm happy it exists, I streamed the whole thing and I feel good about that.

All there is to say, really!

Yeah I fell kind of behind on the completes because I was like, do these games "really count" and yes of course they do, every game counts. So uh...

Metamorphabet - An alphabet game about learning the alphabet, by having letters turn into weird surprising things. This was obviously intended for small baby children but weirdo adults like the people who show up to my streams can enjoy it too. As said, I streamed this and it took up much of the first half of this stream here.

Meta Form - This one was more of a visual text adventure, with a point-and-click verbnoun interface. Except verbs could be nouned in many cases. A thinly-veiled metaphor for life with Covid that still took me at least half an hour to get (you can HEAR the "oh!" moment) and a full hour to finish. I really liked it and I'm curious if the author is doing anything else. Actually, hold on a moment ... Yes! Many things. Excellent.

Co-Open - Now here's one I really liked. Co-Open is a game about being a kid shopping by yourself. You can do as much or as little shopping as you like. There's... a remarkable amount to see and do, and I stuck to shopping on-stream and missed a LOT of stuff. If you can play this one and have a tolerance for exploring, please do play this one and explore. It's Good.

Meta Form and Co-Open were played during this stream, Meta Form at the start, Co-Open at the end.

It's kind of been percolating in the back of my head that you cannot make art if you're going to be normal about it. You have to be some kind of weirdo. You need to get into freak mode. You have to get too excited and too into something and then you can make art that's cool and good.

Ringlorn Saga is what happens if you get real excited about old-school bump-system combat and decide to make it a little more complex, and the game it's in a little less mean. No game-overs, just a deal with death to come back and fight again.

But because I too am hype about bump-system combat, I enjoyed the tactical expansion of it by selecting one of three damage types before ramming into an enemy sideways or from behind. Pick the right type of damage, you do more damage. Hit the enemy from the front, they may block or slap you back or both. It's simple, it's straightforward, it works supremely well.

My only complaint about Ringlorn Saga is that I kept getting lost and that's, like... that's just me. I ate a magnetic monopole at birth and now compasses don't work on me. "This week on getting lost with Xyzzy: Xyzzy is fucking lost." is a running gag on the channel.

Speaking of the channel you can watch me play this game here if you want to.

So yeah I played this one once before and you can basically take all that and it's still true and correct, except for the part about the sequel being out soon because the sequel was in this "Complete" pack I bought on the PC.

Still haven't played the sequel! Not gonna go STRAIGHT into it but I promise it'll get done.

Anyway I streamed this very slowly on Marathon Mweekends and here it is for your viewing pleasure if you want to watch basically an entire Digimon TV series worth of videos.

Had a good time! Ready to move on. Little bit of burnout hit there. Ah well.

Tchia is a very tropical game that's currently exclusive to the Epic store, which means an awful lot of people are skimming right past it. I think that's a tremendous shame because this may be one of my favorite open-world games this year. The traversal and mobility in this game is absolutely unmatched, you can slingshot yourself around the map in any of a number of different ways.

As Tchia, a young girl who can possess objects and animals, you're on a quest to rescue your father from the evil king ... well, look this plot gets real weird, real fast. It has the style and tone of a folk legend, but what you're supposed to be doing isn't always all that important when you could instead be stacking rocks or swimming around or doing flips or taking photos.

I dunno. I loved this game half to death and was sorry to see it go. You can skim some videos on this playlist and decide if it's worth thinking about yourself, but you don't have to.