Feels like a good time to shelve this, maybe I’ll come back to Vampire Survivors eventually. This made for a great touch screen phone game while I held my newborn to get her to fall asleep, and I put in 15 hours or so over various nights the last few weeks. On the surface, Vampire Survivors is one of the simplest games I’ve ever played- you see your 8-bit style character from a 3/4 perspective and literally only control the direction they move in, as hordes of thousands of enemies constantly chase you down. How long can you survive? Move into the right spot and you’ll automatically deploy your weapons; kill enough enemies and you’ll get to select more weapons and upgrades as you slowly become a walking bringer of death. I went from not enjoying this for a couple hours, to figuring out how to play it and loving it for about ten, til I finally hit a wall and seemed to be getting nowhere about halfway through the game. I’ve experimented with lots of different setups and the further I get from Genarro the more fruitless runs I’ve had, killing my interest. I think I’ll come back to this again at some point, but I won’t force it.

Can probably shelve this one- I’ve been dabbling with the campaign off and on for almost a year now. When I went to look up some tips on a late level I got stuck on, it appeared that the general consensus in the Beat Saber community is that the campaign is a waste of time. Say no more! I’ll put this on the shelf and pick it back up at my leisure for new artist release packs, never to worry about finishing the campaign again.

Anyway this is a lot of fun, a really well done rhythm game that seems like a must-buy for anyone with a VR system. You wave sticks in the air to slice through blocks in the style of Guitar Hero and Rock Band. The game is pretty self explanatory but one thing I will highlight is how good it “feels”- the tactile feedback you get from even just holding your virtual sticks together makes it feel like they’re real, and it goes a long way towards my enjoyment of the VR aspect. Good stuff! My only displeasure is the aforementioned campaign, which adds needless extra rules (like, wave your hands 500 meters or purposefully miss a minimum number of notes without failing) that make the levels less fun and more frustrating.

I know these choose-your-own-adventure games are boring to some, and hell you could argue they aren’t even really games, but I feel compelled to play them all anyway. As Dusk Falls is another decent addition to the genre, focusing on the fallout of a robbery gone wrong in a sleepy Arizona town. You play as a few different characters first through the night of the robbery, and then trying to move on with the rest of their lives. There’s loads of different paths you could end up on- some story beats that seemed obvious, perhaps even unavoidable in my play through actually appear to be ones that only a minority of players ended up choosing. More than many other games of this type Im interested in replaying some sections just to see what else could happen, because the story seems like it could really change a lot with some different choices. But we’ll see! Also of note, a lot of threads are left hanging, clearly Interior Night is planning on a sequel. Sure, put it on Game Pass and I’ll be back.

The hallmarks of Limbo and Inside are there- short runtime, clever puzzles, trippy story told without dialogue. But where Somerville goes wrong reveals just what made those two so special. The 3D environment makes it confusing where you’re supposed to go or what could be interacted with; the character moves slow enough to make a player want to quit; and honestly I had no idea what was going on here story-wise by the end. I do think a 3D Limbo-like (is there a term for this?) could work, but this one isn’t it yet.

A solid puzzle platformer in the vain of so many great games that have come before it, The Pedestrian lives and breathes in the world of signs, your 2D playing environments scattered around a lively 3D world. This setting allows for The Pedestrian’s greatest innovation, the ability to pick up and move these signs around, connecting them in new ways to alter the flat space your character will traverse. Early puzzles proved a little boring as some seemed to just throw as many signs as they could at you just to brute force the right combination of doors and ladders that will get you through them, but later puzzles really felt clever and by the end I felt plenty satisfied with the few hours I spent on The Pedestrian.

Perhaps the best example of what a western RPG can be. Mass Effect 2 sees commander Shepard, burned by the Citadel bureaucracy in Mass Effect 1, shacking up with a less savory organization to achieve their common goals. Rather than the plot-heavy focus of ME1, Mass Effect 2 switches things up by tailoring the gameplay around the character- a majority of the missions in the game are either to find/recruit a new teammate, or to win over their loyalty as you prepare to embark on a potential suicide mission. It rocks, it expands on the universe of ME1 wonderfully, and I haven’t even mentioned how much freedom the game gives you by loading up on renegade and paragon actions to really let your own personality shine (I went as an asshole this second time around). A decade later, it still holds up, and I’m excited to replay 3 soon.

Oh yeah my one knock that keeps it at a 4.5- I like to read dialog and press X to skip to the next line in the conversation before the character finishes speaking, but doing this too much locks you out of taking some non-neutral actions in your conversations. That was a little annoying.

Cool idea for a game, pulled off about as well as I can imagine- you’re reinvestigating a years-old murder by studying some long-forgotten witness testimony tapes, but the catch is you can only view them by plugging in the right keyword based on what you’ve watched so far. Maybe you watch a video that mentions a new name, or location, well you can check that and see what other information is available; there’s hundreds of clips, so it’s satisfying investigating and unlocking more and more clips. Personally I pulled out my notepad app and had a stack of topics that grew to 40 or 50 long as I tried to put the whole story together. What’s even more impressive is that even though all of the clips in the game could conceivably be viewed in near-infinite different number of orders, Her Story still manages to weave a plot together, with twists and a strong sense of pacing. Cool stuff! I’ve heard nothing but bad things about follow-up Telling Lies, so I guess I’ll skip it.

Mixed feelings on this one. Trek to Yomi is a short ode to samurai movies that has striking visuals, with a grayscale palette and fixed camera angles, scratchy audio and faux-film irregularities- it really does look like an old movie sometimes, and that’s just great. The world here is fun to explore around, as I loved how most of the little nooks and crannies were hidden into the environment. But combat, the meat of the whole game, always felt sluggish- maybe I’m just not patient enough to be a true samurai? I found it odd that on normal difficulty I rarely had much difficulty with boss fights, but random encounters would frequently kick my ass. Also frustrating was how often the game would force my character into scenarios where he couldn’t turn back- often I would notice two paths forward, take a guess at which one was the true path forward and which was the side quest, and if I guessed wrong then those collectibles were just sealed off. How is that fun?

Overall a cool idea, but even with its short length I’d only recommend playing the first chapter or two of Trek to Yomi.