Time to mix drinks and change lives.

VA-11 Hall-A was the final game I beat in 2023 and what a great sendoff it was. Huge thanks to @wheatie again for providing me with a copy of this game as a christmas gift - please consider showing her some support!

As a visual novel, VA-11 was quite different from the ones I played before, since I never got around to actually playing a normal slice-of-life VN. Considering I've (nearly) only played murder mysteries in this format, it was a nice change of pace to read a visual novel with a welcoming and cozy atmosphere for once. The cyberpunk aesthetic and soundtrack are a perfect match for the direction of VA-11 and quickly help to immerse you in the setting. I might just talk about the soundtrack a little more while I'm at it. The game allows you to pick 12 different songs from a diverse collection so you can set your own soundtrack. There's an integrated music player so you can listen to your favorite songs on shuffle and repeat or even skip some if you're not feeling them at the moment. Thankfully you can always switch out the jukebox songs each in-game day, so if you happen to really dislike a song, you can just swap it out for something else. So yeah, there's that. However, a good visual novel shouldn't need to rely on the soundtrack alone to be enjoyable, it also needs unique and entertaining characters. VA-11 has quite the quirky cast; seeing the talking Shiba with sunglasses for the first time certainly got a good chuckle out of me. His name being Rad Shiba didn't help.

The actual gameplay itself is really simple and nothing noteworthy. You click some ingredients on the right side of the screen and drag them together to mix a drink. While this mixing mechanic is just a plot device most of the time, sometimes you'd also get different dialogue from the customers, depending on the amount of alcohol they had. Somehow I only realized this when I already was nearing the end of the game, but I don't think it makes a huge difference, just a different topic every now and then.

That wraps pretty much everything up I wanted to say about this game already. It's a solid experience and I'd strongly advise anyone who likes cyberpunk settings or a good visual novel to try VA-11 out. Just please listen to my advice from earlier and don't rush it - take breaks if you're feeling bored. Grab a snack and just enjoy what lies ahead.

Thanks for reading. See you in 2024!

I have never actually finished Portal before, but this game has plagued my Steam library for years, so eventually I gave in this evening to see for myself why it's so universally loved. And now I can see the appeal!

It's a very straightforward puzzle game with the origin of one of the most iconic gimmicks in gaming - the Portal Gun. It's like the coolest thing you can have in a game besides grappling hook mechanics; sometimes I'd just shoot portals and walk through them continuously for fun or freefall for a bit. Portal also wastes no time with cutscenes, it's basically uninterrupted gameplay from start to finish (loading screens obviously excluded). In general, the puzzles are pretty clever and often require you to think out of the box (well, literally). A personal highlight for me were the snarky comments of GLaDOS - an AI assistant that accompanies you throughout the facility. I found the weakest part of the game to be like halfway through, where you have seen a bunch of mechanics a couple time already, but the game does little new to innovate them - before the ending segment, that is. The entire final sequence was a blast to play and felt fresh again after the tedium of some previous puzzles. That's the innovation I like to see.

If you're a puzzle fan or just need something you can beat in one sitting (if you're dedicated), Portal is a great time and I would very definitely recommend it for the low price you can get it on various Steam Sales. Really looking forward to playing Portal 2 soon!

A first person shooter in which you won’t get a gun for the first 50 hours and there is only one enemy: Canada.

By the time you do find a gun, you will feel quite foolish to be holding it. For one, you won’t know how to use it, and you’ll have only four or five bullets to learn; your aim will sway and shake from the cold as you look nervously down the sights. For two, what are you going to do, exactly? You can’t shoot a Canadian winter to death.

And by this point, perhaps you won’t want to kill Canada anyway. The snowscape is haunting and beautiful, and every time you stop to get your bearings, each frozen scene looks like a perfectly painted postcard… except for the wolves moving like shadows at the far treeline… except for the thudding of heavy snow from the pines that might instead be the thudding of a bear just over the next hillside… except that every moment spent admiring the scenery is bought with your calories, with heat, water, fatigue… and now there are terrifying gray clouds scudding in from the west…

Do you truly want to take that shot now? With those wolves nearby, with the blizzard coming on?

Or do you break for your cabin, and try to survive another long night, hungry in the dark?

The Long Dark might well be my favorite game of all time. It came along in the post-Minecraft boom of lonesome survive-em-ups, but after a decade of constant development it’s still unsurpassed in the genre. Every time I install, for instance, a survival mod for a game like Skyrim, I find myself thinking “I see you’ve stolen a bunch of stuff from The Long Dark, but I wish you’d stolen more.”

Here the basic mechanics are tuned as taut as violin strings, working in concert and in conflict with each other to always leave you feeling pressured, and make every small gain feel like a hard-fought epic win. The sound of the snowy woods is wonderfully authentic, the art style is painterly and original. Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard [i.e. Jennifer Hale or Mark Meer] plays the Canadian voice of your internal monologue, and it’s weirdly perfect. Much like the real Canada, it’s occasionally monotonous but sometimes breathtaking.

I played over two hundred hours on the early Steam builds before switching to the PS4 version, since it looks gorgeous on a big tv and it feels more fun to chase for trophies on a console. I think the game is best on the second-hardest difficulty (“Interloper”) though I dial it down to play on the slowest day-night cycle, because I like to have a bit of time to think and chew the scenery between life-and-death decisions. (That said, it’s worth noting that nearly all of the games trophies can be unlocked on any difficulty level. Faithful Cartographer, here I come.)

You may not enjoy it as much as I have, but I absolutely would recommend this to anyone. It’s been a five-star game since about 2014, and Hinterland’s ongoing updates just keep making it better.

Sights & Sounds
- The game is extremely nice to look at. The color palette is bright and vibrant to the point that I found myself stopping and looking around at the scenery fairly often
- Although the voices aren't performed by their MCU counterparts, the voice acting in this game is superb. Quill's actor could be a little grating at times early on, but he grew on me over the course of my playthrough
- Textures, lighting, and liquid effects are all very well done

Story & Vibes
- The writing is amazing and the game is hilarious. Very true to the spirit of the comics
- The story is far better than I expected it to be. I actually liked the plot more than that of GotG 2
- Almost all characters are well-rounded and interesting. I think they could have painted the antagonist as a little more sympathetic, though. It's easy to sympathize with the antagonist's motivation for trying to destroy the universe, but a little more exposition would have gone a long way in making that boss fight more interesting
- The game managed to make me care about a child character

Playability & Replayability
- I want to give this one a replay. There's a ton of hidden areas, and I missed out on about 60% of the collectibles. Exploration in this game is fun enough to warrant a revisit sometime in the future. The prettiness of the environments and the hilarity of the dialogue would make it not feel like a chore
- Combat is fine. If you've played a Kingdom Hearts game, it'll feel pretty familiar. At first, it's fun to dart around the battlefield, order your team around, and bust out special moves while blasting away with your multiple weapon modes, but the battles all begin to feel a little same-y after a few hours
- The space flight sections suck. The controls are clunky and there's very little variety in the enemies you face. They are mercifully rare, though
- I don't know why the developers felt like quick-time events were necessary; the story was engaging enough without forced engagement in cutscenes/scripted events. Also, why do I die when falling off a cliff on a scripted fall/slide (forcing a reload with long load times), but missing the very next jump just takes a little of my health?

Overall Impressions
- I had to mess with NVIDIA settings a bit to cut down on framiness. The optimization is mediocre compared to other modern games.
- Once I got things running smoothly, the game was a feast for the senses and a blast to play. Unfortunately, the payoff was dreadfully long load times
- Cosmo is 11/10 best boy

Final Verdict
- 8/10. The outstanding visuals, fantastic writing, an interesting plot, and a whole lot of exploration more than make up for the game's flaws