HI………..
Happy holidays!!! ❄️ ❄️ It’s the last update of the year! I hope you’re enjoying a relaxing time with your friends and family, vacationing away from work and duties and all that. I’m still in at work since I spent my vacation days in November (for all those game releases lol). Usually my strategy is hoping that December will be chill since everyone else will be on vacation, but uhhh that hasn’t panned out super well this year 🤣 it’s alright though, I’m hanging in there!
TL;DR
Finished: Mouthwashing
Ongoing: Baldur’s Gate 3, Dragon Age: The Veilguard
Next Up: indies/first looks while keeping up with BG3/DAV
Some thoughts on the channel this year
Finished Stuff
Mouthwashing: Very interesting (and horrifying) indie narrative adventure about a spaceship crew stranded after a crash. I really enjoyed the aesthetics and the storytelling. Definitely on the lookout for whatever these devs cook up next!
We also checked out as a first look:
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: A first-person stealth-focused Indy game by Machine Games. I’m not familiar with Indy at all but so far it was very fun to sneak around and whack enemies on the head lol. This reminded me of how much I missed Machine Games since Wolfenstein 2! The only reason this is a first look is pretty much because I don’t have capacity right now – I’ll get back to this later on!
Current Stuff
Baldur’s Gate 3: We’re in Act 3, the home stretch, except it’s still quite a bit aways from the end…!? This areas in this act already seem noticeably denser compared to the previous acts. I get the impression it’s going to be the longest one yet.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard: I’m about 20ish hours in (Act 1) and my impressions haven’t changed vastly since last update. It’s been easier to enjoy once I adjusted my expectations & became more familiar with all the things Veilguard’s been doing differently from the previous DAs, but overall it’s a mixed bag.
Upcoming Stuff
As mentioned last time, I’m not thinking about too hard about other stuff with BG3 and DAV on my plate. I know having two long series can be kinda samey so I’m trying to complement it with indie stuff and/or first looks here and there. I’d like to check out Thank Goodness You’re Here in a few days! It’s a comedy “slapformer” that I’ve heard is very funny, which sounds like a great way to cap off the year to me 🌈
Year in Review
Looking back at the channel this year, I think we covered some good ground. Some of my personal favs:
Metal Gear Solid (1 is my fav!)
1000xRESIST (glad to see word of mouth really working for it lately)
Silent Hill 2 Remake (enjoyed the story unabashedly, even it being a spooky horror game didn’t take away from that)
Personally I would’ve liked to check out a few more indies. We did a few really lengthy AAA series that sucked up a lot of time, and I’m going to be real, I don’t think all of that was quality time well spent lol. (The silver lining is that these have really gotten me to think about how to better handle the balance between completionist tendencies vs what is truly engaging, both for me as the player and you as the viewer. But that’s another topic for another time!) I’d like to change that in the coming year after wrapping up BG3 and DAV, and hopefully it won’t be difficult with stuff like:
Deltarune Chapter 3 & 4 (boy I’m gonna have to refresh myself on the first 2 chapters)
OFF (a landmark RPGMaker title - I remember this being recommended to me quite a bit before)
The Talos Principle: Reawakened (can’t believe they’re doing a remaster just for me, now I have no excuse to not check it out)
… wow! I’m getting excited just looking at this list. And of course I haven’t forgotten about stuff I passed by like RDR1 too, but let’s finish up those big AAAs first 🤣
Let me know what your favourite games this year were! As always, thank you for sticking around and sharing your time with me in 2024 – it’s your support that allows me to do all this, and it’ll never not be crazy to me that all this gestures vaguely is a thing 🥹
Have a wonderful holiday season, and I’ll see you back in the New Year ☃️
Welonz