this was fun for a bit but i got to the third gym and was faced with probably having to just grind for a while and i kinda feel done with it. i dunno, maybe i'm just done with this sort of pokemon game.

slight asterisk: I played vanilla DS2 when it came out but haven't played the DLCs or the Scholar version at all

i also started replaying DS1 and DS3 but didn't get very far in any of them

velvet is lesbiab

dropped because the combat is so aggressively un-fun to me. and the characters didn't really get any hooks in me in the hours i played. main story seemed interesting tho

i couldn't get either version of DQ8 working on emulator so i played this instead

well, i started it. but will i finish it? who knows.

had to quit due to technical difficulties. save points didn't work (crashed the emulator) so i was using save states and then accidentally overwrote the wrong slot and lost too much progress. the start of this game is molasses and i couldn't be bothered to go thru it again

thought it felt terrible to control and didn't find any of the story it was setting up compelling. was hoping it'd at least be good enough for a braindead open world fuck-around-and-collect-stuff game but it really isn't

Playing co-op with my girlfriend. We've gone through two campaigns so far and it's a very cool game. The way it crafts a lot of story out of a lot of procedural elements is genuinely impressive. The main plot of any campaign is set but the characters you have and all the little adventures they go on along the way are randomized. I cared more about making sure Marennen the Warrior and Hetty the Witch made it out of the final battle alive so they could go be happily married in retirement than most other video game stories or characters.

BUT. The game is really janky (in multiplayer). The text chat is hard to use because it constantly scrolls around on its own, or clears what you were typing, or just disappears sometimes. We get desyncronized a lot and sometimes that leads to one person getting a story comic while the other gets dumped into whatever was next without any context. It can be really frustrating to deal with because basically every click feels like you're shaking the game and hoping it doesn't fall to pieces.

Oh and story progress doesn't carry over. She's been hosting the game and so I have to replay the tutorial to unlock anything else. But the Legacy Pool is shared with both of us, so it seems like it was a conscious choice to share some stuff but not others.

i can barely play this, i think i am Burned Out on these

ok technically i started this last year but i played a whole lot of it and finished it this year so i'm putting it here

i thought it would go on slightly longer? felt a lil abrupt tbh. kinda cool tho even though body horror and jump scares/screamers aren't really my thing. but it's a cool thing for what it is

fuck this game, i had like negative fun playing it and just cheat engine'd thru the combat so i could see the story/writing and then all that stuff sucked too, what the fuck. such a bland, milquetoast game, why bother enhacing the edition of it

and now, a few weeks later, i am considering playing the sequel because i am an absolute fool

tried it out for maybe twenty minutes, it has a cool mechanic but i didn't feel a big draw to play however many hours this game is. it's fine idk

pretty fun until the last third(ish) which felt like mean level design and bad story telling

Technically started playing this in late December but finished the last 45 minutes or so on January 1st. I really really liked this and if I had played it earlier I probably would have included it in my goty list. Great visual style, (mostly) comfy gameplay, a charming and moving story. And it was only about 5 hours long which is something I really appreciate in games nowadays. Get in, tell your story, and get out. Good stuff.

At first I thought this was just some Fallout-inspired CRPG but it turns out there's a whole lot of Roadside Picnic/S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in there too. At the time of making this list, I'm ~16 hours in and it's pretty fine so far? The writing hasn't been anything special (lightly satirical of capitalism, is maybe the best way to put it). Despite being Fallout-inspired, I think this fixes one of Fallout 1+2's biggest issues where the combat never has any meaningful changes as you play but in this you now unlock a lot of active skills as you level up and it can really change how you approach combat.

I'll fill in more thoughts when I've finished it, stay tuned.

froggy i love you

i need to go lie down

extremely good, wowowowow

they added a trans goth mommy, what do you expect, of course i'm going to play this dumb game that i'm terrible at

i love it when people take a game engine built for making a specific type of game and then hack it to make something else instead. very pretty art with a nice story/message in it

sometimes you're trans you have a hard time accepting your body as being your own, y'know

has this type of story been told a lot? yes. does this game tell it really well? also yes

fun lil game that breaks the fourth wall. doesn't overstay its welcome

a game about bein a cute lil guy in a ball and rolling around while some nice music plays

hell yeah

cool idea but felt too luck-based which made it very hard to make any progress

it was a cool lil poetry thing and i tried to replay it so i could see one of the other 'routes' and it crashed, so

this is the first bitsy game i've seen with screenscroll and i actually gasped when i saw it for the first time. otherwise not super notable to me?

went on a bit too long (had too many "go get another ingredient!" steps) but it's cute

it's funny but idk it wasn't enough for me to get thru the whole thing even though it's short

I bet how I feel about this game is how other people feel when I finally convince them to play Eight Thirty Nowhere

(it's neat and pretty but it's very empty. i thought there'd be progression because i jumped into a dug-up grave and the world changed but that wasn't actually any progression)

strange little thing? honestly kind of reminds me of The Beginner's Guide in that you start to ask "wait, is this real? is this about a real person? are these chat logs real?". But in The Beginner's Guide it was pretty clear it wasn't whereas this it genuinely could be, I have no idea.