Games Completed 2019
- Sinclair Gregstrum
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Re: Games Completed 2019
Jan - Streets Of Rage 2 - (Switch)
Jan - Detroit: Become Human (PS4 Pro)
Feb - Quarantine Circular (Switch)
Feb - Yoku’s Island Express (Switch)
Feb - Shenmue (PS4 Pro)
Mar - Rise of the Tomb Raider (XOX)
Apr - Gunstar Heroes (Switch)
May - Street Fighter 5 (PS4 Pro)
Jun - The Division 2 (XOX)
Jul - Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle (Switch)
Aug – Burning Rangers (Saturn)
Burning Rangers is a very late Saturn game from June 1998, sandwiched just a few weeks after Panzer Dragoon Saga and a few weeks before the very last European Saturn release, Deep Fear. It was developed by Sonic Team, who at the time were one of Sega’s crown jewels and still under the stewardship of Yuji Naka.
The game is a fully 3D third-person action title with an anime/sci-fi aesthetic, with the player taking on the role of a rookie Burning Ranger (basically a futuristic firefighter!) on missions to put out fires and rescue as many survivors as you can in as fast a time as possible. The game has a classic graded ranking system akin to Sonic Team’s previous game NiGHTS Into Dreams to judge your efforts, and in total there are four missions, with the whole game beatable in just a 3-4 hours if you know what you’re doing.
I’ve owned Burning Rangers since release, and as a die-hard Saturn guy until the bitter end, I was pretty excited about the game to say the least. It was slim pickings back then, and the promise of a new fully 3D action game from the creators of Sonic and Nights was more than enough to get a starved Saturn fan going! The game looked stunning in screenshots, with beautiful lighting effects, open 3D environments, and layered transparencies of the like believed almost impossible for the Saturn’s obtuse hardware to produce. There was also an awareness that these were the end-times for the console and getting hold of a copy might tricky, so I was all over it like a rash come release week (decent condition PAL copies go for £100 - £200 these days!).
Despite this excitement, Burning Rangers was something of a disappointment at the time for me. I found the whole thing quite hard to control, even with the Saturn’s analogue 3D pad which the game fully supports. You spend as much time in the air hovering and being propelled by jet boots as you do on the ground running around, and trying to traverse the environments and find survivors while putting out fires and trying not to get blown up, just wasn’t that fun. So I put the game down around mission 3, and never really went back for a long time. I have dipped in and out of the game over the years and found it much more approachable, but I still hadn’t seen it through. So when I decided I wanted to play something from my Saturn collection that I’d not completed before, Burning Rangers was top of the list!
First the good stuff – in some ways Burning Rangers is one of the Saturn’s most graphically impressive games. The fully 3D environments, the lighting, the transparencies, the steady frame rate, and the slick character animations - it’s a pretty game by the 32-bit standard of the day. The anime cutscenes are also really well done, and show off the art direction of the world and characters nicely. Grainy by today’s standards, sure, but well done all the same.
The sound is also particularly notable. There is no map of any sort to guide you around the areas in Burning Rangers, but instead there is a nifty voice navigation system where you can call on the ops lady back at base, and she’ll know where you are in the level and where you should be going next. It’s a very clever and accurate system, and something I’ve not really seen done before or since. The game also hosts one of the quintessential, peak 90s Sega soundtracks. Take rock, jazz, and hip hop beats, and mash them together with shamelessly enthusiastic and cheesy vocals, and you’ve got yourself an absolute winner!
The gameplay is…fine, to a point. The central loop of putting out fires, hunting down survivors, watching out for explosions and falling structures – it’s all ok. When it clicks and you’re not struggling to see what they hell’s going on it’s really quite fun in fact, but sadly the stars don’t align for that to happen too often, certainly in the second half of the game. The camera is, as is so often the case with 3D games of that generation, a stinker at times. It really requires constant manual tweaking to get it pointing in the right direction, and far too often you find yourself looking in entirely the wrong direction while getting blasted by an unseen explosion. Bad times.
Sadly this is just one of the technical issues that lets the game down, with the aforementioned impressive graphics proving a real double-edged sword. Yes they look lovely at times, but they are also incredibly unstable. Wobbly, fractured polygons were common back then, but even by the standards of the day Burning Rangers really struggles to hold together, with big chunks of the environment clipping in and out all over the place and making traversal a real guessing game. Mission 4 in particular, which has some of the largest and most ambitious environments, becomes barely playable at points (the swimming section in particular is horrendous!). Now the Saturn was never the strongest with 3D, but equally it proved itself a perfectly capable machine in the hands of the right developer. Sonic Team certainly weren’t lacking talent, so given the late nature of the game it feels that this might be a case of rushing to get it out and not enough time spent on polish and optimization. A real shame, as it’s huge black mark against what could and should be a top-tier Saturn exclusive.
So Burning Rangers is a mixed bag. It is enjoyable and impressive at times, but the high price tag of a PAL copy (or indeed a US NTSC one) makes it hard to recommend for all but the most committed Saturn gamer. That said, the IP has never been heard from again and the game was never released on any other platform, so if you’re really into your Sega curios this AAA Sonic Team Saturn exclusive should definitely be on your list!
Jan - Detroit: Become Human (PS4 Pro)
Feb - Quarantine Circular (Switch)
Feb - Yoku’s Island Express (Switch)
Feb - Shenmue (PS4 Pro)
Mar - Rise of the Tomb Raider (XOX)
Apr - Gunstar Heroes (Switch)
May - Street Fighter 5 (PS4 Pro)
Jun - The Division 2 (XOX)
Jul - Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle (Switch)
Aug – Burning Rangers (Saturn)
Burning Rangers is a very late Saturn game from June 1998, sandwiched just a few weeks after Panzer Dragoon Saga and a few weeks before the very last European Saturn release, Deep Fear. It was developed by Sonic Team, who at the time were one of Sega’s crown jewels and still under the stewardship of Yuji Naka.
The game is a fully 3D third-person action title with an anime/sci-fi aesthetic, with the player taking on the role of a rookie Burning Ranger (basically a futuristic firefighter!) on missions to put out fires and rescue as many survivors as you can in as fast a time as possible. The game has a classic graded ranking system akin to Sonic Team’s previous game NiGHTS Into Dreams to judge your efforts, and in total there are four missions, with the whole game beatable in just a 3-4 hours if you know what you’re doing.
I’ve owned Burning Rangers since release, and as a die-hard Saturn guy until the bitter end, I was pretty excited about the game to say the least. It was slim pickings back then, and the promise of a new fully 3D action game from the creators of Sonic and Nights was more than enough to get a starved Saturn fan going! The game looked stunning in screenshots, with beautiful lighting effects, open 3D environments, and layered transparencies of the like believed almost impossible for the Saturn’s obtuse hardware to produce. There was also an awareness that these were the end-times for the console and getting hold of a copy might tricky, so I was all over it like a rash come release week (decent condition PAL copies go for £100 - £200 these days!).
Despite this excitement, Burning Rangers was something of a disappointment at the time for me. I found the whole thing quite hard to control, even with the Saturn’s analogue 3D pad which the game fully supports. You spend as much time in the air hovering and being propelled by jet boots as you do on the ground running around, and trying to traverse the environments and find survivors while putting out fires and trying not to get blown up, just wasn’t that fun. So I put the game down around mission 3, and never really went back for a long time. I have dipped in and out of the game over the years and found it much more approachable, but I still hadn’t seen it through. So when I decided I wanted to play something from my Saturn collection that I’d not completed before, Burning Rangers was top of the list!
First the good stuff – in some ways Burning Rangers is one of the Saturn’s most graphically impressive games. The fully 3D environments, the lighting, the transparencies, the steady frame rate, and the slick character animations - it’s a pretty game by the 32-bit standard of the day. The anime cutscenes are also really well done, and show off the art direction of the world and characters nicely. Grainy by today’s standards, sure, but well done all the same.
The sound is also particularly notable. There is no map of any sort to guide you around the areas in Burning Rangers, but instead there is a nifty voice navigation system where you can call on the ops lady back at base, and she’ll know where you are in the level and where you should be going next. It’s a very clever and accurate system, and something I’ve not really seen done before or since. The game also hosts one of the quintessential, peak 90s Sega soundtracks. Take rock, jazz, and hip hop beats, and mash them together with shamelessly enthusiastic and cheesy vocals, and you’ve got yourself an absolute winner!
The gameplay is…fine, to a point. The central loop of putting out fires, hunting down survivors, watching out for explosions and falling structures – it’s all ok. When it clicks and you’re not struggling to see what they hell’s going on it’s really quite fun in fact, but sadly the stars don’t align for that to happen too often, certainly in the second half of the game. The camera is, as is so often the case with 3D games of that generation, a stinker at times. It really requires constant manual tweaking to get it pointing in the right direction, and far too often you find yourself looking in entirely the wrong direction while getting blasted by an unseen explosion. Bad times.
Sadly this is just one of the technical issues that lets the game down, with the aforementioned impressive graphics proving a real double-edged sword. Yes they look lovely at times, but they are also incredibly unstable. Wobbly, fractured polygons were common back then, but even by the standards of the day Burning Rangers really struggles to hold together, with big chunks of the environment clipping in and out all over the place and making traversal a real guessing game. Mission 4 in particular, which has some of the largest and most ambitious environments, becomes barely playable at points (the swimming section in particular is horrendous!). Now the Saturn was never the strongest with 3D, but equally it proved itself a perfectly capable machine in the hands of the right developer. Sonic Team certainly weren’t lacking talent, so given the late nature of the game it feels that this might be a case of rushing to get it out and not enough time spent on polish and optimization. A real shame, as it’s huge black mark against what could and should be a top-tier Saturn exclusive.
So Burning Rangers is a mixed bag. It is enjoyable and impressive at times, but the high price tag of a PAL copy (or indeed a US NTSC one) makes it hard to recommend for all but the most committed Saturn gamer. That said, the IP has never been heard from again and the game was never released on any other platform, so if you’re really into your Sega curios this AAA Sonic Team Saturn exclusive should definitely be on your list!
- MajorGamer
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- Posts: 135
- Joined: October 14th, 2016, 6:33 am
- Location: Toronto, Canada
Re: Games Completed 2019
- Spoiler: show
A neat little typing game that is no pushover and has more to it than I was expecting. Enemies often take multiple typed words to kill and a single touch will kill you. You get elemental powers to aid you that help out. For example, fire will slowly burn the next word of the enemy and ice will freeze them in place for a bit. You need to juggle your powers (they need to be typed in to swap) and the enemies to successfully clear things out. I type at 90-100 wpm and still died a few times.
You also get to explore and do some minor puzzles along the way between those enemy encounters. They are developing another game like this that I'll be keeping my eye on.
Aug 2 - Moonlighter (Switch)
This revolves around two different systems and I wouldn't call either great. First is the shop part where you sell what you find. That's about it. You set the price of goods and there are low/high demand for items but with no time pressure, there is no reason to try and maximize what you get. Instead you can just go for the average on everything and be fine. Even then, by the time you are in the middle-end of the game you can earn enough in a single day to purchase some of the best gear yourself.
On to the dungeons. They are also fairly basic. The original flash version of Binding of Isaac had better designed rooms, enemies, and attacks. There are a few different weapons you can use but none particularly stand out and it does the standard armor thing with lighter armor with better movement vs heavier armor while being slower. There's some inventory management to be done but it doesn't add much. Some items will do things to items in a certain direction in your inventory, some good, some bad. Good ones can be used to earn more money when selling and bad ones can be placed so their affect does nothing.
Ultimately, the game is fine but I wish there was more to it. Recettear is still my top shop/dungeon game.
- Combine Hunter
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- Joined: August 27th, 2012, 4:40 pm
Re: Games Completed 2019
- Spoiler: show
Dictionary definition of a solid 8/10. Does nothing new or surprising, just executes everything to a really high standard.
- Pitwar
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- Posts: 323
- Joined: September 2nd, 2012, 9:46 am
- Location: Banbury, Oxfordshire, UK
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Re: Games Completed 2019
27th Jan - Captain Toad Treasure Tracker (Switch)
1st Feb - New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe (Switch)
9th Mar - Crackdown 3 (Xbox One X)
6th May - Mortal Kombat 11: Story Mode (PS4 Pro)
12th May - God Of War '18 (PS4 Pro)
19th May - Horizon Zero Dawn (PS4 Pro)
23rd May - Shadow of the Tomb Raider (PS4 Pro)
26th May - Devil May Cry 5 (PS4 Pro)
1st Jun - Days Gone (PS4 Pro)
8th Jun - Blood & Truth (PS4 Pro)
8th Aug - Resident Evil 2 (PS4 Pro)
I didn't pick up the RE2 remake right away as I'd played it back in the day on the original PlayStation. However, so much time had passed I'd seemingly forgotten everything about it so it was like playing a brand new game.
I've only finished Leons story and may do Claires down the line, but won't jump back in right away. It's a great game though and well worth a play if you love the franchise.
1st Feb - New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe (Switch)
9th Mar - Crackdown 3 (Xbox One X)
6th May - Mortal Kombat 11: Story Mode (PS4 Pro)
12th May - God Of War '18 (PS4 Pro)
19th May - Horizon Zero Dawn (PS4 Pro)
23rd May - Shadow of the Tomb Raider (PS4 Pro)
26th May - Devil May Cry 5 (PS4 Pro)
1st Jun - Days Gone (PS4 Pro)
8th Jun - Blood & Truth (PS4 Pro)
8th Aug - Resident Evil 2 (PS4 Pro)
I didn't pick up the RE2 remake right away as I'd played it back in the day on the original PlayStation. However, so much time had passed I'd seemingly forgotten everything about it so it was like playing a brand new game.
I've only finished Leons story and may do Claires down the line, but won't jump back in right away. It's a great game though and well worth a play if you love the franchise.
- Simonsloth
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- Joined: November 22nd, 2017, 7:17 am
- Location: London
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Re: Games Completed 2019
- Spoiler: show
DJ Hero
Not too sure how I feel. The music in the game wasn’t always to my taste so the forced setlists and repetition of some of my least favourite tracks made this less pleasurable than it could have been. I’m optimistic about the sequel though.
- Combine Hunter
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- Posts: 892
- Joined: August 27th, 2012, 4:40 pm
Re: Games Completed 2019
- Spoiler: show
Really happy to knock this classic off my backlog. Really great, but I prefer the more polish level design of the original DOOM.
Re: Games Completed 2019
Judgement
My GOTY so far. Took a while to get going but yet again another great story wrapped around a great city with some characters that in the end I cared about. Streets ahead of Yakuza Kiwami but not quite reaching the highs of Zero.
I hope we get another Judgement game in the future
My GOTY so far. Took a while to get going but yet again another great story wrapped around a great city with some characters that in the end I cared about. Streets ahead of Yakuza Kiwami but not quite reaching the highs of Zero.
I hope we get another Judgement game in the future
Re: Games Completed 2019
1-8 - Kid Icarus: Uprising (3DS)
Being on a faraway trip has allowed me to spend a bit more time with my handheld backlog and finally get to the end credits of this one. I thought I was almost there last time I was playing it, but there were a lot more chapters opening up. Really got into upping the difficulty for better rewards and buying and fusing the more powerful weapons.
Wow, what a fantastic game. I think this is the best thing you can play on 3DS. So much content, depth, and polish and the controls are spot on once you really get to grips with them. It's this crazy contradiction, then, that the uncomfortable ergonomics and the small screen never made me stop wishing this one had come out on Wii U or another home console system instead. That said, the stereoscopic 3D is brilliant.
Being on a faraway trip has allowed me to spend a bit more time with my handheld backlog and finally get to the end credits of this one. I thought I was almost there last time I was playing it, but there were a lot more chapters opening up. Really got into upping the difficulty for better rewards and buying and fusing the more powerful weapons.
Wow, what a fantastic game. I think this is the best thing you can play on 3DS. So much content, depth, and polish and the controls are spot on once you really get to grips with them. It's this crazy contradiction, then, that the uncomfortable ergonomics and the small screen never made me stop wishing this one had come out on Wii U or another home console system instead. That said, the stereoscopic 3D is brilliant.
Re: Games Completed 2019
You’ve gone bananas in Nepal. You’ve gone bananas in Nepal.
Yeah, Kid Icarus Uprising is well cool. No need for a silly stand is there.
Yeah, Kid Icarus Uprising is well cool. No need for a silly stand is there.
Re: Games Completed 2019
- Spoiler: show
This was a really nice experience that I enjoyed a whole lot. Exploring around the world was a joy, where near every inch of it was beautiful, and the atmosphere was calming and serene. My thoughts on it are pretty much the same as what I covered here, so I don't want to repeat myself too much. But the word "idyllic" is really the perfect thing to describe it that I keep coming back to. It's got a few minor issues however, with it having a fair number of technical hitches and glitches, a less than brilliant UI, some poor character animation, and some somewhat harsh restrictions on what you can do and where you can go at the start, but none of that stuff overshadows what is overall a wonderful little journey full of gorgeous sights, quirky characters, and a neat premise of being a travelling artist that creates a really good diegetic reason to want to record the sights and memories you make during your visit to this enchanting little world. I was a little sad to say goodbye at the end of all of it, but at the same time it felt like the right thing to do.
- Combine Hunter
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- Joined: August 27th, 2012, 4:40 pm
Re: Games Completed 2019
- Spoiler: show
The biggest surprise here is the storytelling. I expected good tactical fights and a colourful cast, but was not expecting the plot to be kind of original (on the curve of Tactics games) and the stakes to be more compelling than the usual end of the world stuff.
- Indiana747
- Member
- Posts: 1016
- Joined: September 3rd, 2012, 5:17 pm
Re: Games Completed 2019
(Jan) Starlink :Battle for Atlas - PS4.
(Jan) Far Cry 5 - PS4.
(Jan) Resident Evil 2(2019) - PS4.
(Jan) Shadow of the Tomb Raider - XB1X.
(Feb) Metro Exodus - XB1X.
(Mar) Marvel's Spiderman - PS4.
(Apr) The Division 2 - XB1X.
(Apr) Dead Rising 3 - XB1X.
(Apr) World War Z - XB1X.
(Apr) Earthfall: Invasion - XB1X.
(May) RYSE: Son of Rome - XB1X.
(May) Tacoma - XB1X.
(May) Abzu - XB1X.
(May) Mortal Kombat X - XB1X.
(May) The Walking Dead:A New Frontier - XB1X.
(May) The Gardens Between - XB1X.
(June) Crackdown 3: Campaign -XB1X.
(June) Days Gone(platinum) - PS4.
(Aug) Wolfenstein :Youngblood - XB1X.
(Jan) Far Cry 5 - PS4.
(Jan) Resident Evil 2(2019) - PS4.
(Jan) Shadow of the Tomb Raider - XB1X.
(Feb) Metro Exodus - XB1X.
(Mar) Marvel's Spiderman - PS4.
(Apr) The Division 2 - XB1X.
(Apr) Dead Rising 3 - XB1X.
(Apr) World War Z - XB1X.
(Apr) Earthfall: Invasion - XB1X.
(May) RYSE: Son of Rome - XB1X.
(May) Tacoma - XB1X.
(May) Abzu - XB1X.
(May) Mortal Kombat X - XB1X.
(May) The Walking Dead:A New Frontier - XB1X.
(May) The Gardens Between - XB1X.
(June) Crackdown 3: Campaign -XB1X.
(June) Days Gone(platinum) - PS4.
(Aug) Wolfenstein :Youngblood - XB1X.
- ColinAlonso
- Member
- Posts: 585
- Joined: September 6th, 2016, 9:13 pm
- Location: Dublin
Re: Games Completed 2019
- Spoiler: show
Loved it. Absolutely loved it.
I like games where movement feels cool. Gravity Rush is a good example of that feeling for me. Spidey swinging is his iconic move and here it feels really good and is backed up by other good traversal moves. So off the bat we have something I enjoy.
The story was an entertaining romp through a large group of Spider-Man's villains with some nice characterisation brought to the ones who got more screentime. I like that they used an experienced Spider-Man who has the superhero bit pretty well sorted but he is still working on the Peter Parker side of his life. It might not be groundbreaking but I enjoyed the story and even got a wee bit emotional at the end.
Combat gives you a lot of things to have fun with and isn't too challenging. I liked mixing up what gadgets and moves I'd use and messing around with it. The bosses don't stick out, they're neither peaks or troughs in the game. Stealth takedowns are fun and useful.
Upgrading gadgets is nice progression but the suit mods was a bit too much and I left it alone (apart from changing to the Maguire suit for the Halloween party. )
I don't play too many open world games but I recognise the icons all over the map style is dying out. As many others have said, this game is full of icons. Usually I'd ignore these but combined with how fun traversal was, I went after a lot of the early game stuff (towers, landmarks, pigeon chasing). I particularly liked the backpacks as the reward for each was a line about Peter's past. However the game does not let up and the challenges and anything added in the last third was mostly ignored.
It looks great, the voice acting is great, the music leans too heavily on standard superhero sounds and is quite repetitive.
Its my favourite game that I've played (for the first time) in 2019 so far.
DJ Hero 2 next then maybe Spider-Man DLC.
Re: Games Completed 2019
Dino Crisis
20 years after buying it I finally finish it for the first time. The second half was a slog with the new enemies, I spent half the time in the map menu plotting the best routes from a to b.
I think I got the good ending by the sounds of it ( I was told I have "mad skills")
Got the sequel ready to go on the Vita is it any good?
20 years after buying it I finally finish it for the first time. The second half was a slog with the new enemies, I spent half the time in the map menu plotting the best routes from a to b.
I think I got the good ending by the sounds of it ( I was told I have "mad skills")
Got the sequel ready to go on the Vita is it any good?
- James
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Re: Games Completed 2019
- Spoiler: show
I've been playing this for nearly 6 weeks now. I really like having a puzzle game for whenever I have 5 minutes to fill, and Picross-style puzzles are great for this. Honestly, I don't have much familiarity with the Konami art that's in the game; it's cool pixel art, for sure, but that's as far as it goes for me.
Boss puzzles are on a 3-hour countdown timer, which bottlenecks progress through the 500 puzzles in this game. I tried to pace myself on the regular puzzles so that I wouldn't end up doing a lot of waiting come the end of the game. I failed terrifically at that, and have spent the last few days running a 3-hour timer on my phone to make sure I knew when there was another boss puzzle for me to do. It's a weird choice to forcibly slow the player down, but not one that negatively impacted my enjoyment.
The game offers hints and allows up to 4 puzzles to be in progress at one time. I didn't use either of these features, because I'm too obstinate to use hints and not finish a puzzle once I start it. Thankfully, all puzzles can be solved without guessing; I did get stuck on one 5-star puzzle, and ended up making one guess to solve it, but I was so indignant about that that I re-did it the following morning and proved to myself that it was solvable by logic alone.
I can't recommend Pixel Puzzle Collection enough. It didn't come out until January in this, here Europe, so it'll absolutely be among my eventual games of the year list in a few months' time.
- Simonsloth
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Re: Games Completed 2019
What?! I’m gutted as I thought I was the only one with mad skills.DomsBeard wrote: ↑August 16th, 2019, 9:22 am Dino Crisis
20 years after buying it I finally finish it for the first time. The second half was a slog with the new enemies, I spent half the time in the map menu plotting the best routes from a to b.
I think I got the good ending by the sounds of it ( I was told I have "mad skills")
Got the sequel ready to go on the Vita is it any good?
I remember preferring the sequel but then my memory has a habit of playing tricks on me!
- duskvstweak
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Re: Games Completed 2019
Finished the first ending of Hollow Knight. I see there's a few more endings to chase at another time and place, but for now, I'm gonna just enjoy what I've completed. It's really a great game, though the map got me once or twice. It's one I do plan on coming back to.
Re: Games Completed 2019
Did you find out why the bank is best avoided..?duskvstweak wrote: ↑August 16th, 2019, 11:47 pm Finished the first ending of Hollow Knight. I see there's a few more endings to chase at another time and place, but for now, I'm gonna just enjoy what I've completed. It's really a great game, though the map got me once or twice. It's one I do plan on coming back to.