strawdonkey

Game of the Year 1. Splatoon 3 2. Neon White 3. Drainus 4. 5. Biggest disappointment: 1. 2. 3. Best visuals 1. 2. 3. Best audio 1. 2. 3. Best writing 1. 2. 3. Best not 2022 game: 1. Outer Wilds 2. Crimzon Clover: World Explosion 3. Best developer: Team Ladybug Best format/console/controller/brain interface: PC

I've not played Gunvein yet (but everyone here seems to love it) but the rest of those games are brilliant. Word of advice if you go into Danmaku 3 - don't get too fixated on scoring/chaining early on, the scoring system in the game is extremely punishing basically requiring you to both full-chain and no-miss every single level in order to get a good score. Congrats on the Mushi 1CC! that game's no joke.

52. Puzzle Quest 2 File this one firmly under "what the fuck am I doing with my life". Puzzle Quest 2 is the most match 3-ass match 3 game in existence, with a dungeon crawler layered on top of it. There's some cool ideas - you build up mana by matching the coloured gems, which can be spent on spells(my set up involved turning purple mana into a shield, and then turning other coloured gems purple in order to deal damage and take extra turns whilst topping up the purple mana shield), action points by matching the gauntlets (which can be spent on weapon strikes or shield usage) and deal damage to your opponent by matching skulls. As you progress you level up and can start to put together a build of sorts - getting bonuses for certain attributes, making it easier to build mana of certain colours, along with supplementing your strategy with equipment and weapons. But there's just so fucking much of it. Each room contains at least one dickhead for you to to out-puzzle, often several who must be destroyed via gems before you can progress to the next whatever it is. Occasionally the game throws you a curveball where you have an alternate win condition (usually taking your weapons off you and replacing it with a context action that's an auto win) but also sometimes giving the enemy utterly busted shit that means you need to incorporate resource denial into your play. But mostly it's just matching the gems over and over and over and over again mixed with existential dread. That last bit, I don't think is intentional.

51a. Neon White (good end, all hidden presents) This was probably not worth the time investment save for the bonus missions you unlock during the process. The hidden presents are a real mixed bag - the good ones are in plain sight or a predictable location (such as the top of the tallest structure in the level) but some of them are hidden in really obnoxious places, such as directly above the spawn or under a grate near the end of the level. Collecting the presents unlocks a bunch of dialogue and also some bonus levels which really lean in to certain themes - one character's levels prevent you from using any secondary fire, another gives you lethal obstacle courses where the ground and walls and ceiling are all spikes, etc. There's also the ongoing problem with the leaderboard functionality being broken if you resume from sleep mode - it works great on first boot, but if you resume from sleep you can't even manually reconnect to the leaderboards without a full reload of the game. It's really not good enough in a game that thrives on Being The Fastest, though it is otherwise still superb.

I loved this game but the leaderboard thing was a massive downer when you consider it's a game about going as fast as possible. The glitch is even more annoying because you can't just prompt the game to connect to the internet again - if you try to load the leaderboards after resuming from sleep it fails to connect, so the only way is to load it from scratch again. Not really good enough and definitely soured me on some of the extra post-game content. Still a brilliant game though.

Best thread on RLLMUK. In!

Did anyone get the little pre-order bonus statue and it's looking to shift it on?

I sold a random trading card on Steam for about £3.50 so treated myself to Hellsinker since it's on sale. Man that game is a trip, I have no idea what I'm doing and pretty sure I just got my face punched off by the final boss. Feels like there's about four shmups' worth of mechanics crammed into one game.

I just tried it on Higurashi episode 8 and in all honesty I think the sprites look worse than the default Steam ones, though it does add clearer backgrounds, full voice and lipsync so it depends what you're looking for. There's also the fact that I've played eight fucking games with the default Steam ones so I may be just having Uncanny Valley issues.

https://07th-mod.com/home/ I didn't find the updated PC graphics to be bad (for Higurashi at least, haven't got around to the other games). The original ones aren't so good but the Steam releases default to the updated graphics.

This is excellent news, the original Graze Counter is wonderful.

I did another Long Live The Queen run. Gained magic powers early, maxed out on those and regular combat, and spent the rest of the game just trying to avoid death whilst turning dissenters into a smoking pair of shoes. Won the war by destroying much of the opposing fleet with magic only to awaken a kraken which would require magically sealing for the next twenty years or some shit. I don't think there is a truly happy ending, but there is some satisfaction in seeing how your bright ideas play out. Will likely consume a bunch more of this via other people's YouTube playthroughs, but the journey to, and the completion of, those two successful runs has been glorious and stupid. 51. Neon White (bad end, all Ace times) Neon White is an FPS/Visual Novel/Platformer hybrid that requires you to do a little bit of shooting and a lot of zipping around levels as fast as possible. There is some story stuff about killing demons in heaven which is kind of fine but really this is all about the mechanical side of things - an FPS where platforming and traversal is not only integral to your progression, but actually feels really good. There's two main steps to Neon White - finishing the level without dying, and then finishing the level without dying under a set time so that you can progress - you need to finish about half the levels under the gold time to be able to progress to the next set of levels, and there is also the ace time above that (which grants you access to the online leaderboards, which are buggy as hell on Switch as they flat out don't work if you ever resume from sleep mode) if you are so inclined. And then there's staff times which are extremely fast. I have one, and whilst I have plenty of times that are way under the Ace threshold, having seen how tight those are I'm not inclined to get any others. The mechanics work in an interesting way - you pick up guns throughout the level which appear as little playing cards. They're easy to identify - the yellow one is a handgun, the red one is a shotgun, etc. They have a limited supply of ammo and behave much as you'd expect, but also have an alternate use - you can discard the weapon to do some traversal-based ability which is generally essential to getting around the level. Discarding a handgun lets you do an extra jump, even in the air; discarding a shotgun fires you off in the direction you're currently looking; other highlights include the rocket launcher which not only lets you rocket jump wtih the regular shot but also has a grappling hook as its alternative use, and the purple machinegun, which fires a bomb which can be used for destruction, a rocket-jump style jump, or in the best cases, both at the same time. And then to win a level? Kill all the demons (who are static and in the same place each time) and get to the end of the level ASAP. It's simple and brilliant and addictive and I've loved every minute of it thus far. The bad end is because there are hidden presents in most levels, which unlock more dialogue between the characters and also bonus levels, which are usually an exploration of a specific weapon type and are super satisfying. Once you've got most/all of those, then you can get the good end. The downside is, some of the presents are hidden in really annoying places and it is a bit souring having to spend ages hunting around and falling to your death a lot until you spot it. Figuring out how to get to them once you know where they are is usually a lot of fun though. The Visual Novel stuff is not especially groundbreaking, though there isn't a lot of it. I've heard a few people bemoan the amount of text, but as someone who played eight Higurashi When They Cry games in the last 12 months, this is very lightweight by comparison - but you can skip it and won't be missing out on much. Absolute banger of a game in general.

Coming to Switch. [edit] already out!

Nothing quite like winning your last match at the stroke of midnight and getting to 984/999. I am far more annoyed about this than I ever should be! To be fair I had an awful record (13-25) so definitely could have made the difference anywhere in there by simply being less shit.

50. Long Live The Queen I've had this kicking around in Steam for years - up until recently I last played it in 2015 apparently, and it recently celebrated its tenth anniversary of launch and released on consoles too. It's a stat-building visual novel where you play as Elodie, the future queen of Nova who is waiting the 40-ish weeks until her coronation. Your input comes in two forms - deciding what Elodie is going to spend her time learning about, and making bigger decisions about what's going on in the country. And also, try to avoid the numerous attempts at assassination that head your way throughout the countdown to coronation. There's multiple routes through the story depending on your choices, but also the most innocuous things can change the route you take drastically - learning about music allows you to see that the court musician who auditions for you is actually not amazing, and instead enlist her as a spy; but similarly there are some sections which are almost gated and require a slightly balanced education, such as the suspicious box of chocolates that arrives for you one day, which will be eaten unless you pass a skill check in one of about six categories. I definitely kept a lot of saves for this and would sometimes have to go back a couple of weeks and grind a particular stat to just be able to Not Die, but other than that it's fun to own the playthrough and all the terrible decisions you made. There's plenty of intrigue remaining - early on you're approached by someone who's invented movable type and without a very specific set of skills you tell them you're not interested; there's a treasury to sneak into, a war to win (or not lose) and a whole subplot about magic use which I'm really interested to see more of. Definitely embrace the save system - it gives you a load of pages of save files for a reason - becuase without it this can be a bit frustrating, even if it feels a little like cheating to see the future. [edit] 50 games fucking hell