Finished Crymachina!

As I mentioned on my previous comment this game has a lot of flaws, and I don’t know if I can call it good or recommend it - but it does have its fair share of charms too.

They did a really good job in making me care about the main characters and see them as a “family” - seeing Leben geting gradually closer to the others and Enoa’s growth over the game was great. The character designs are interesting, the OST is solid. The plot is a bit of a mess, with a LOT of crazy twists, but I still enjoyed it.

Combat is fun and flashy, and I never got bored of it while going through the main game. That being said, there’s a lot of extra content that I didn’t do, and I think that if I tried to go for full completion the repetitiveness would end up wearing me out.

Also, a minor thing, but I’m really annoyed that I didn’t realize before the endgame that you can equip the same gear to all three characters. Spent quite some time trying to find good setups without overlaps. :/

Playing Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights.

This “metroidvania” game has a very melancholic mood in all aspects - visuals, music and storyline. You play as a little girl who apparently is the last survivor of a line of priestesses, who goes purifying monsters in ravaged land while being protected by the spirits of dead warriors.

I always associate darker visuals and styles with Dark Souls so I was worried it would be another game going towards that direction, but this one is a lot less stressful to play - it can be fairly challenging and I already died quite a few times, but there’s zero penalty for that.

There’s some really good QOL features too - I like how a fast travel is unlocked less than 1h into the game, and I love that the map indicates if there are missing still missing items in a room. This is a particularly big deal because some of the rooms are huge and can take a long time to explore.

Anyway, so far I’m enjoying this one.

Still slowly making my way through Sparks of Hope. I’m almost done with the third world and it’s been my favorite one yet. Having enemies that don’t trigger reaction abilities finally forced me to switch up my party a bit. Mario and Luigi’s hair trigger abilities have been really good in the first game, so I was really surprised to see them getting buffed to an absurd degree in the sequel! I don’t think the game expected me to focus all my skill points into that tree, but I know what I want.

I recently completed Nier: Automata. I’ve beaten the game before, but didn’t complete it. Granted, ‘completion’ refers to just the Steam achievements and 100% sub quest completion, I don’t need every in-game metric to be maxed out, especially fishing.

So with that slot opened up, I will finally play Batman: Arkham Knight for the first time. It wasn’t the next game I planned to play, but hearing about the failure of the Suicide Squad kinda put me in the mood for it. To be honest, I’m… kinda nervous. I love the other Arkham games (even Origins) and I didn’t have a PC strong enough to run Arkham Knight until a few months ago, so I’ve always had an excuse not to play it. And now I can finally play it… I really can’t describe why I’m nervous about it. It’s like seeing an old friend again for the first time in many years. A good kind of nervous, I guess.

Old school, Terranigma. Finally got around to it. Was never released in my region.

I got “A Void Hope” by Elden Pixels. It’s a puzzle platformer. I’m enjoying it so far.

After nearly five months and 260 hours, I finally finished Starfield at level 105 with 1000/1000 achievements, all main quests, and all the side quests and activities that weren’t bugged.

I ended up with 23/24 powers (including the one you get as part of a companion mission), but Vladimir refused to give me the final location and I had no other quests to complete besides the final one.

I’ll take another look once the Shattered Space DLC is released, probably within the next couple of months.

Always, not just this weekend: Nintendogs + Cats on 3DS. I’m not in a rush to get through everything the game has, and I’m not “good at the game” insofar this is even a criterion for this type of game. I posted a screenshot in a comment to the weekly thread a few weeks ago. Since then, I discovered that you can only have 3000 screenshots on the 3DS’s memory card (I made a post about that on [email protected]). 3000 might sound like a high number, but it is really not if you have a lot of near-misses in pressing the capture button. So now I have the interesting secondary task of sorting through all the screenshots that I moved to my desktop. Not really a game, though.

In addition to that, I started a new playthrough of Pokémon Crystal. I’m doing a not-so-hardcore Nuzlocke challenge to make it more interesting for myself. But this is really not about difficulty, this is what I can play in short bursts without having to use my brain all that much (I have other games in my backlog for that, and also other non-game things to do). While I still have my childhood Gameboy Color and game cartridges that I keep for sentimental reasons, I opt to play on an emulator on my Android for convenience.

I'm eyeing a run through of Pokemon Crystal because I am still on that kick. XD

My husband just picked up the Demo for Unicorn Overlord and to be honest it looks pretty good, so I'm tempted to also give that one a try. The pacing is nice and snappy and the game play seems straightforward enough. The story is a pretty standard hero's journey, which isn't high praise but certainly doesn't count against it.

Who doesn't enjoy the occasional boxed-mac-and-cheesesque storyline?