Games Completed 2021

[Truk_Kurt]

Great post, you have made me very interested to play Hellbalde now.

[Truk_Kurt]

Spoiler: show

1. Gris
2. My Friend Pedro
3. Doom Eternal

4. Donut County
I have been quite enjoying playing short games at the weekend as I slowly work through my main game Yakuza Like a Dragon and thought I would give Donut County a go after someone recommended it on Twitter after it hit Game Pass last week. It's a fun little game full of charm. I wouldn't really say it belongs to a genre as it is a very casual experience but would probably be classed as a puzzle game, but it is very easy.

You play as a hole in the ground and suck things into the hole which makes the hole bigger which then allows you to swallow up bigger things until the environment is cleared, as I say, it's very easy but it is still satisfying to see things get swallowed away and when the level is totally cleared. Only takes a couple of hours and I would recommend if you're looking for a nice chilled game (and an easy load of Xbox achievements, sadly for some reason they didn't pop on the PC Game Pass version which I was playing).

[Combine Hunter]

Spoiler: show

06/01 - Monster Hunter: Iceborne (PS4/PS5)
22/01 - Black Mesa (PC)

24/01 - HITMAN 3 (PC)

Well...I saw the credits, not done with this yet.

[Alex79]

4. Donut County

You reminded me, I meant to play this ages back when Shaun mentioned it on TCGS. Just picked it up on mobile for three quid or so.

[ironedflemming]

3. Dark Pictures Anthology: Man Of Medan - PS5

Played through in co-op with a friend which I think is the optimal way to play, can't see single player being as much fun.

The presentation is what I enjoyed the most, story is so so but does the job. Managed to get a couple of characters killed but thats all part of the fun

[Simonsloth]

Great post, you have made me very interested to play Hellbalde now.

Agree completely. Great post and great game. It’s a short, perfectly formed piece and it made me genuinely sad that Microsoft bought the studio. I worry their creative vision will be hampered.

[ReprobateGamer]

24.01.21 - Donut County - Xbox One

First completion of the year - though this is only a playthrough and not a 100%

It is a charming and quirky game and doesn't outstay it's welcome but the premise begins to wear a little thin in even it's short playtime (2-3 hours). It does manage to keep introducing mechanics - there is a surprising amount you can do with a movable hole - and it remains simple to control. As it's on Game Pass currently, it's certainly worth a try

[Miririn]

Thank you both for your kind words It's not a perfect game, and I'm not sure if I'd play it again, but in terms of what the creators set out to do (combining mental illness and mythology), they have created a really interesting experience for the player. I tend to be quite boring and play a lot of AAA games when I should be branching out more and trying independent titles, and this game was a good bridge for me. The graphics feel very AAA but the storyline and approach to themes felt quite experimental and esoteric.

I am sad about the Microsoft acquisition because it means I may not get to play. I guess if I ever get around to replacing my seven-year-old laptop I could maybe look into a PC that can run graphically-intense games, but I don't really like playing games on a computer. The trailer looks pretty wild and intense so I'm cautiously optimistic about the game itself. Plus I heard it's set in Iceland, so it will be beautiful! But I'm not so sure where the story can go, though. I felt the first game ended pretty well.

[ColinAlonso]

Spoiler: show

Jan 1 - Slay the Spire (Switch)
Jan 10 - Streets of Rage 4 (PS4) (Cherry - Normal)

Jan 24 - Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana (Switch) (True Ending)

Really fun JRPG. Solid combat which I've discussed on the whatcha been playing thread. But I do want to say that since then I gave all the party members a fair go and their differing styles and skills were a good bit of fun (though goddammit they had to include a young girl as a party member, getting really tired of kids in my party, especially as she has the best moves).

Exploring the deserted island is a great hook and the plot develops nicely from there. The set-up made me think about the differences between the big globe spanning JRPGs and the tighter affairs like this. The former usually has a lot of grand locations and set pieces but the latter has more developed NPCs like the castaways here. They develop with the story and have their own sidequests. Both styles have their pluses but I really like this.

It took me just under 60 hours to complete which is the sort of length I like in a JRPG, too many stretch towards 100 hours or so. I liked it enough to map the whole island, do all the sidequests that I found and max Adol's relationship with nearly all castaways (damn you Katthew!). Between this, SoR 4 and my 45+ hour Slay the Spire addiction its been a great start to my gaming year.

Spoiler: show

So despite my fears in my comment a couple of weeks ago, Dana and Eternia doesn't ruin the themes of the plot too much, even though what happened in their time becomes central to it. There are some interesting twists, some I saw coming, some I didn't. The destruction of Eternia is handled quite well.

Despite all this, it does end with a final battle in a pocket universe of floating platforms against a god-like creature for the fate of the world (kinda) so I'll have to dock it a little for that.

Also in the whatcha been playing thread, I told Magical Isopod that I reached an odd tree. Turns out we were talking about different trees, I was only starting to climb the mountain.

[ironedflemming]

4. Donut County - PS5

Fun charming little game that didn't outstay it's welcome, nice little palate cleanser in between playthroughs of bigger games.

[ReprobateGamer]

Spoiler: show

Jan - Donut County - Xbox One

27.01.21 - Eastshade - Xbox One

What do you get if you mix a first person rpg with a walking simulator? That seems to be the premise for Eastshade. You arrive on the eponymous island on a quest to honour your mother's memory by painting four landscape paintings based on area's on the island that had special meaning to her. As is apparent from the main quest, this isn't a game that requires you to spend any time with a weapon in your hand ...
There are actually quite a range of tasks that are given to you through this game, some of which would not be out of place in any rpg - but most are based around your ability to paint.

And the island of Eastshade is designed to be picture perfect wherever you are, whether that's the lush forests around the opening town of Lyndow, the curving architecture of main town Nava, the rugged and desolate Tiffmoor Bluffs, or the everpresent moon (planet?) that looms in the sky. I say designed but this is when the game's limitations begin to kick in. Firstly there's the RPG baggage of regular people not minding the stranger that barges into their homes to steal candles and idly flick through a book, or folks that don't want to travel the few minutes to deliver a message (though I appreciated the honestly of one quest-giver basically saying he couldn't be bothered ...). Then the technical limitations kick in. One quest marked itself completed when it wasn't and in doing so locked out an achievement (for anyone playing - don't rescue the man from the hidden cove until you have the children in the farm).
And the draw distance! Possibly the worse example of pop-up I've seen in a game for years. Whole swarves of landscape just appearing out of thin air. The painfully low res textures that would suddenly switch to high res (but not always). The hot air balloon and one windmill were almost always visible wherever you were on the island but which largely should have been obscured by trees from most places- except that the trees were the worse offenders for snapping in and out of existance seemingly at will. Or the ice cave where you could just row your boat right into the mapping and see underneath it all. Never mind the NPC sleeping above their bed or the single NPC who would always be walking in the same direction along the same bit of path and half the time would be at an unreal angle, or model would be glitching out, or moving at double speed
Shockingly bad for a game that was released in late 2019 quite honestly. And a pity because there were some absolutely lovely landscapes and it's actually a very nice, chilled game.
I will say that my children who watched me play through this were smitten for the most part (my youngest has since started her own playthrough). And I actually liked it. I'm just shocked that this level of graphical issues made it into a finished product on a game very much based around it's visuals.

To be fair I suppose, in a world where the likes of AAA titles are allowed to be released in a clearly unfinished state, this seems to be more and more the prevalent way of things. I can only hope that this is due to it running on my older original model Xbox One and that the Series X and PC versions. Nevertheless, this diminished my enjoyment and immersion of a game that wants to be lovely, that should be commended for creating an adventure game where violence is never the answer and which is soured by the apparent lack of QA

[Shy Monkeys]

Exploring the deserted island is a great hook and the plot develops nicely from there. The set-up made me think about the differences between the big globe spanning JRPGs and the tighter affairs like this. The former usually has a lot of grand locations and set pieces but the latter has more developed NPCs like the castaways here. They develop with the story and have their own sidequests. Both styles have their pluses but I really like this.

It took me just under 60 hours to complete which is the sort of length I like in a JRPG, too many stretch towards 100 hours or so. I liked it enough to map the whole island, do all the sidequests that I found and max Adol's relationship with nearly all castaways (damn you Katthew!). Between this, SoR 4 and my 45+ hour Slay the Spire addiction its been a great start to my gaming year.

I really need to play the Ys series, I'm very interested in it after going through all of the (available in English) Trails/Kiseki games, and hearing that it also has really good NPCs has me more interested.

[Flabyo]

Jan 17th - Quantum Break (XBO)

Jan 26th - Donut County (XBO)

Fun little game, didn’t take very long to beat (and going back up to get the achievements I missed took about 20 minutes with the chapter select).

I think it could’ve stood to be a little longer and explored its mechanic more than it did, but what’s there is fun enough.

That’s two gamepass games already this year... and there will be many more.

[Gadget8Bit]

Jan 27th - Prey (2017) - PC

So, I tried to beat this game when it first came out and I managed to get myself into a game breaking scenario halfway through, so I sacked it off.

I don’t know why, but I decided to play it again on stream and actually finish it this time.

I love the aesthetic of the game. Talos-1 is a glorious playground to cause chaos in. The Art Deco design of the station evokes a little Bioshock in my mind, but it’s altogether something more impressive.

Like the classic Immersive Sims of yore, the game has a multitude of paths through each encounter. I went combat focused this time round, taking several offensive powers to add to my arsenal. The Typhon enemies do not mess around. Apart from your common garden mimics, almost every enemy in the game is VERY dangerous. Phantoms are hard to hit and come in several different flavours, Technopaths will ruin your day from a distance, Weavers will toss radioactive cystoids at you, everything wants to murder you hard.

Spoiler: show

The story starts off as vaguely conspiratorial sci-fi fare, but as you go on things start to make less and less sense. Character motivations become obscured and they start to act out in ways that don’t suit them. It’s not until you reach the post credits scene that it’s revealed that the whole game is a test. You are actually a Typhon, with the memories of Morgan Yu forced into your mind and tested to see if you could be the bridge between humanity and the Typhon. Everything you encounter is a test, an assessment to see if you can be the saviour humanity need. It’s a marvellous twist

The last hour of the game is very chaotic, with the game essentially throwing EVERYTHING at you. I ended up running around like a demented speed runner avoiding every combat encounter as it simply wasn’t worth the ammo to engage with anything.

It’s definitely well worth playing. Especially if you’re a fan of the old school of immersive sims.

[Miririn]

3. The Last Guardian

Finished this at around 2:00am last night in floods of tears. A lovely game that tapped into the "I have approximately five thousand photos of my cat on my phone" part of me, and resurrected the child-me who loved all those weepy nineties films where a child bonded with a dog/cat/dinosaur/killer-whale/horse/robot. The game's ability to realistically replicate an animal's behaviour was definitely the best part and Trico felt like the most "real" animal AI I've encountered. There was a real feeling of looking into his (her? its?) eyes and realising somebody was home. It's a game that encourages the player to reasses their approach to animal AI in games. Trico isn't a sentient horse-car like Roach, nor is he my obedient loyal steed like my horses in RDR2. He's a creature with his own mind, fears and ways of thinking, and I had to work both with and around him to progress.

There were frustrations. The button prompts on screen are jarringly ugly, especially when the rest of the game looks like a fantasy book painting. The wobbly camera made me feel a bit motion sick. I could maybe argue that the clumsy controls were designed to convey the sense of helplessness and lack of control of being a small, weak boy trapped in an overwhelming, frightening environment... but I'm not sure if that was the intent or if the controls were just bad.

But the emotional heart of the game was so moving, and the atmosphere, music and visuals were so great, that I can overlook the mechanical flaws. People have already pointed out that the game shares a lot of DNA with Studio Ghibli films, and I agree. But what the game really reminded me of was reading fantasy books by Nahoko Uehashi or Ursula K. Le Guin - books with strange and uncanny fairytale worlds, full of made-up languages and magic systems. There's always a vaguely frightening and disturbing undercurrent in these worlds that I found replicated in this game: a sense of a great, dangerous and unknowable power. Being isolated in this foreboding world made it even easier to bond strongly with Trico. It was fun playing a game where I wanted to both protect my AI companion and also to be protected by him.

I really loved this game, as I think anyone who loves animals probably would. I'm glad I hadn't played "Shadow of the Colossus" or "Ico" first, so I went in with no hype or expectations.

Edit - I also listened to the Cane and Rinse podcast episode, and I am sorry that I cannot remember the name of the contributor who told this story, but: listening to your story about your dog with food guarding issues made me cry(!) I'm glad everything worked out in the end.

[Indiana747]

(Jan) Call of the Sea - Series X.
(Jan) Remember Me - PS3.
(Jan) Ghostbusters Remastered - Series X.

[Gadget8Bit]

Jan 29th - The Medium - Series X

Good god, don’t bother. Great story wrapped up in a dull as dishwater game. Not fun to play at all and buggy as hell on the console it was intended to run on. Watch a Let’s Play and get the story that way

[Alex79]

JAN - 80 Days (Android)
JAN - What Remains Of Edith Finch (PS4)
JAN - Judgment (PS4)

JAN - Donut County (Android)

Seems like everyone was playing this since it came to Gamepass, so I picked it up on Android. Worked well on a phone, and the game itself was OK. There's something inherently fun about swallowing up stuff and making the hole get bigger and bigger. The story and characters were nice, and overall it's just a cool little package.

[Jon Cheetham]

Spoiler: show

8th Jan - Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin (PS4)
10th Jan - Donut County (Android)
20th Jan - Dark Souls Remastered (Switch)
23 Jan - Bastion (Switch)

30 Jan - Hitman 3 (PS4)

Brilliant third installment in the World of Assassination trilogy, which has got to be one of the greatest trilogies in video games now. 3 has two missions/maps that are in the top five of the rebooted Hitman games in my opinion, and every environment here is as detailed, engrossing and rewarding as you'd hope for.

They also landed the story, to my surprise - I thought it came to a really enjoyable close. And there are some of the coolest individual moments and reveals in this game too.

Now to really get to know these levels and rinse every map.

Hitman/ 10

(Also played the whole thing with my daughter either asleep on my chest or in her baby carrier the entire time, which is a nice little gaming first in itself).

[Alex79]

(Also played the whole thing with my daughter either asleep on my chest or in her baby carrier the entire time, which is a nice little gaming first in itself).

Ah you'll never forget that. My first time was Bioshock when that came out for 360. I distinctly remember the first time he started trying to grab the controller from my hands too.