Hi,
I hope you’ve had a good start to your 2024! I can’t believe we’re nearly through the first of 12 months already, time goes by way too fast 🥲
The past few weeks have been a bit rough for me over here: lots of overtime at my day job, just feeling kinda bleh in general. The silver lining is that January is a slower game release month so it's okay to sloth around a bit. The same, however, cannot be said of February… 🗿
TL;DR
- Finished: Spider-Man 2, This Bed We Made, Undertale Yellow, Ghost Trick, GOW Valhalla
- Upcoming: … not fully decided! See the long winded thing below.
Finished Stuff
Spider-Man 2 (15 parts, 1.5-2hrs each): It’s everyone’s beloved Spider-Man, but there are lots of little things that give the impression they had resource constraints: features excluded that were previously in SM1, story pacing oddities, etc. The swinging & combat gameplay are still fun enough for me to overlook all of that though. It’s not a bad game at all, but doesn’t give quite the same kind of “WOW!” factor as SM1.
This Bed We Made (6 parts): Short & sweet with an engaging mystery to boot. I love how they justified snooping through people’s stuff as a maid working at a hotel lol. This story definitely sought to make some social commentary, and I’m particularly interested by how they handled the ending to facilitate that. I really enjoyed this – very much keeping an eye on this developer, Lowbirth Games, for the future.
Undertale Yellow Pacifist Route (9 parts): A fan-made prequel to Undertale (which, my goodness, was played on the channel over EIGHT YEARS AGO....) Not quite as snappy and witty as the original, but the production quality is through the roof esp. for a free fanwork. I enjoyed their take on this universe!
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective (17 parts): A visual novel of a deceased soul solving the mystery of their own murder. This is a cult classic that people recommend to me every so often, so I’m glad I got to it! Sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartwarming, overall just a fun time.
God of War Ragnarok: Valhalla DLC (5 parts*): This is a roguelike mode for Ragnarok but it doesn’t feel like they cheaped out on the narrative at all. Nothing mega groundbreaking, but I appreciate the closure to Kratos’ story for the time being, and the polish is impressive for a free DLC. I took the main story critical path but the roguelike gameplay itself can go on for several more dozen hours.
*The last video hasn’t published yet as of this post - it’ll be out tomorrow!
First Looks:
Welcome to the Karoshi Club demo: A visual novel I decided to check out on a whim about a laid-off game developer interviewing for a new job (very topical 😬). Its aesthetic reminds me of Junji Ito/WORLD OF HORROR. The writing definitely needs a few more passes; right now it reads like someone clumsily parsed the script through a thesaurus.
Pacific Drive Preview: A crafting/survival/take-care-of-your-car adventure through some ghostly paranormal lands. I’m not quite sure what to make of it all yet – the UI is kind of overwhelming but the eeriness is intriguing. I’m quite interested to check out more when the full thing comes out in February.
Lies of P: My first time checking out a “proper” Soulslike title. I found this fun and structurally quite similar to Hollow Knight (which I adore), but multiple people have mentioned to me they found later parts so difficult they gave up on beating the game… I do want to check out more, but I would feel extraordinarily crappy if I had to discontinue a series because I mechanically just could not finish it lol. If anyone has completed the game and has an opinion do feel free to share – I’m esp. curious to know how the difficulty compares to stuff like Sigrun/Gna from GOW (on normal), or making it through SIFU at a low age.
Upcoming Stuff
I’ve been dragging my feet on picking out the next Big Game for the channel, partially because I’ve been under the weather, partially because I still have post-Dragon Age Inquisition PTSD (lol), and on top of that there are a million things coming out in February I’m keeping tabs on:
- 13th: Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden (action RPG by DON’T NOD)
- 14th: Tomb Raider I-III Remastered
- 20th: The Thaumaturge (isometric RPG set in 20th century Warsaw)
- 22nd: Open Roads (by the team who made Tacoma, published by Annapurna)
- 22nd: Pacific Drive
- 29th: Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
Unfortunately unless if cloning technology is perfected and publicly available in the next 2 weeks, I won’t have capacity for all this 🥲 preliminarily the bolded are the ones I have the most interest in. Hoping for first looks at least for some of the rest! (Feel free to share with me which ones you're interested in too.)
As for a longer series: I hear everyone and their dog whispering Baldur’s Gate 3 to me in my sleep lol. I delayed checking this out because it clashed with DAI previously both in scheduling + genre similarity, but I’m going to look more seriously into this over the next bit.
Going to hedge myself a bit and say:
1) I think everyone is expecting a 100000 part series commitment right off the bat, but I don’t know how this will go for sure – I know nothing about D&D, I glanced at the character creation and a lot of the language is already complete jargon to me, I don’t know anything about the classes/skills/pre-existing lore etc etc. I will try my best to learn & get into it of course, but I have to say all this just in case :’)
2) Even if a full series, I don’t think I can go super fast on it because a) I’d like to have capacity to check out other stuff concurrently and b) I feel like I pushed myself too hard with DAI last time, and it was Not Great.
TL;DR of what’s on my mind re: the next Big Games on the channel: BG3, FF7R around the corner, plus I still haven't given up on Lies of P yet... yeah this already looks crazy. It's a great time to be a gamer but man they really need to hurry up with that cloning tech!!
Sorry these plans aren’t actually that concrete – it's because I don't know what the heck's gonna happen either lol. There’s 5000 things racing through my mind I’m trying to take into consideration. I think it will look something along the lines of what I mentioned though, and I'm hoping it'll all just magically sort itself out 🧙
EDIT: Figured I could just open a poll for patrons+ to show interest levels in all the games in this post! Feel free to participate here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/97145680
Anyway! That's all the rambling from me for now. Feel free to let me know your thoughts/suggestions/comments below!!
Have a great rest of January,
Welonz