There has not been a Call of Juarez game that I didn't really enjoy, and I've played all of them....
....except The Cartel.
Based on a "Put This on Your Radar" nod from SkillUp, I played through the demo for WORLDLESS (official site), which...
You all need to get this game on your wishlists. It's out Nov. 21 for all platforms (including Switch!). Check it out, you won't regret it. It is freaking amazing. I generally don't like platformers, but I love the vibe and the gameplay of this game.
Demo available on Steam and elsewhere.
It looks phenomenal.
Best part is that it's a $20 game! I preordered it for $18 on Xbox.
Damn that is one hell of an art style & exquisite looking traversal. Wordless is looking like a day one purchase. Cheers BadKen 
Don't forget the L. It's worLdless.
I forgot the name at first and when I searched for "wordless" all I got was a bunch of Wordle clones. 
I finished Alan Wake 1 yesterday, including the two DLCs. I played through it on Easy difficulty just to finally clear it off my backlog, and prepare myself to start AW2.
I also finished Super Mario Wonder early last week, took a break for Alan Wake, and then popped back into Wonder to fully 100% it - which I achieved late last night.
Don't forget the L. It's worLdless.
I forgot the name at first and when I searched for "wordless" all I got was a bunch of Wordle clones. :D
Whoopsie! I totally missed that, thanks for the correction
I takes two. Great game, maybe cheesy plot but in a fun way. Highly recommended. Some of the levels and their design are crazy good.
Took a mental health day off from work and spent all day horsing around with my 9-year-old nephew. We rolled credits on Super Mario Wonder. Best damn decision I've made in months. I need to not let myself get to the raggedy edge before I'm willing to give myself a day to relax.
Finished Lunacid, a King's Field inspired dungeon crawler, which just came out of early access. Fantastic atmosphere, and super satisfying old-school exploration. Just a great game.
Not sure if "Finished" counts, but I did complete my first game of Galactic Civilisations IV: Supernova over the weekend.
It's fun, if spectacularly grindy towards the endgame when you are in front. While it does a lot of things very well - the exploration, the planet management, the use of Core Worlds and subsidiary planets - the combat is still largely a mystery beyond "build bigger ships" and - as mentioned - the end game rapidly becomes a grind of telling newly built ships where to go and dealing the same event from investigating an anomaly for the 100th time.
To play the game wihtout all these distractions I think Stardock expect you to put in a lot of work upfront - designing your own ships for example - it's fun, but not when there are 20 ship types to design, and then have to manually upgraded when you get better components, or research more space to fit them in.
It's a very traditional Space 4x in the vein of Master of Orion 2 and feels a little like it's gone as far as it can down that path. There's a lot to enjoy for the purists, by I suspect other people will probably get bored with it quite quickly.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. That took a while but it was all well spent and enjoyable through and through. I enjoyed it much more than BotW, for certain; it is a clear improvement in most areas.
Resident Evil 4: Remake
When I first heard about this remake, I was opposed to it. How do you improve upon one of the very best games ever made? I was concerned the cheesiness of it all would be lost, and that they may try to make it more AAA action-based than the weird (yet incredibly effective) "rigid action"(?) style of the original.
Pleased to report that they absolutely nailed it. They brought it up to modern standards with gorgeous visuals while perfecting/modernizing the gameplay. The best example I can give is that, in the previous game, you had to stay still to aim. Understandably, that would feel a little too slow for today's style of action combat. I really love how they found the exact right balance in still allowing you to move slightly, but also increasing enemy speed/hostility proportionately such that you felt every bit as vulnerable as in the first game.
Dialogue and character interactions were cleaned up while retaining the feeling of the original. It's perhaps slightly less silly, but that's a happy compromise if it means also having some of the weirder sexual comments removed. Besides, some of my favourite jokes appeared in trophy titles anyway!
My only complaint is a minor one. I'd really love to platinum trophy this game, and still plan on playing it a few times over. However, one of the trophies requires you to get all of the treasures in a single playthrough. No big deal, but there are SO many areas that get locked off with no way to return, and these happen at odd times. As you often need to circle back with keys to unlock chests, it's far too easy to miss something and be locked out. I spent hours trying to get everything on my first playthrough only to have all of that time wasted when I couldn't get back to one of the early zones before moving on to the next. Oh well.
While Baldur's Gate 3 is likely the most impressive and technically incredible game I've played this year, I think RE4R is sitting at the top of my GOTY list due to a mix of nostalgia and amazement that they actually managed to improve upon what I consider perfection. A damn good game.
As a quick thing while balking at larger projects, I just completed The Secret of Monkey Island (again).
The game itself hardly needs introduction, but this is the first time I've played it in a very long time, which meant that there were plenty of details I didn't recall, not to mention that I couldn't remember most of the puzzle solutions.
It was shorter than I remembered, and I was able to get through without looking up any hints—which I honestly can't recall if I managed the first time. Residual memories or am I just a better at these games than I used to be? Who can say?
Concerning version, I had the enhanced edition, but I ended up using a tool to extract the original data files with the music and voice acting of the enhanced version (creating the 'ultimate talky edition'), which could then be run on ScummVM—which also allowed me to play on my Macbook in bed.
I guess I should play LeChuck's Revenge now. I'm working towards playing the recent Return to Monkey Island, though I'll probably play at least Curse and Escape first (even though I know Return continues directly from the second game).
Even Tales of MI is referenced in Return, so I guess you gotta play those too 
Rolled the credits on The Quarry last night for my first run. What a short game. Probably the shortest video game that I ever played.
Even Tales of MI is referenced in Return, so I guess you gotta play those too ;)
I probably should, shouldn't I? Wouldn't want to miss out on anything!
Just rolled the credits on Star Wars Jedi Outcast Jedi Knight 2.
Rolled credits on Mass Effect 3 (Legendary) and ended up accidentally choosing an ending that I didn't intend. It was an extremely anticlimactic ending after playing through all three of these things.
Finally got around to finishing Titanfall 2. That campaign deserves all the accolades it has gotten. The fact that nearly every level had a genre-breaking gimmick that could have been a full fledged game on its own. So incredibly ambitious, and it must have been a ton of work. All done at the highest AAA level.
I kinda didn’t jive with the plot, but it sorta picked up by the end. The relationship to your titan was gold though.
Still can’t really figure out why it never took off though. It has everything. I guess maybe cause western audiences don’t care for mechs? It’s a mystery.
Finally got around to finishing Titanfall 2. That campaign deserves all the accolades it has gotten. The fact that nearly every level had a genre-breaking gimmick that could have been a full fledged game on its own. So incredibly ambitious, and it must have been a ton of work. All done at the highest AAA level.
I kinda didn’t jive with the plot, but it sorta picked up by the end. The relationship to your titan was gold though.
Still can’t really figure out why it never took off though. It has everything. I guess maybe cause western audiences don’t care for mechs? It’s a mystery.
It came out at a bad time and the first game...just wasn't that good.
I agree though. It's my favorite FPS campaign ever, and I didn't tire of it after three playthroughs. I even like the multiplayer, and I typically hate multiplayer.
BT is also one of my favorite characters in any video game ever.
So glad you enjoyed it.
Finished Storyteller a few weeks ago. Inventive little puzzler where you're given a title (such as "A love story ends in tragedy" or "Duchess gets butler arrested") and then have to move characters and objects around on a series of comic-book panels to tell the story.
Others have complained about the short length and lack of content (partly "fixed" now, since there has been a free update featuring a bunch more levels). I didn't mind that. I found the bigger issue to be that it doesn't iterate on its mechanics at all; the way you solve the final chapters are exactly the same as how you solve the opening ones. This gives Storyteller a lightweight feel - a fun enough way to pass time, but not at quite the level I hoped it would be when I first saw trailers for it.
Also:
Lost in Play. Charming and inventive adventure, set partly in the imaginations of two children. It's somewhat reminiscent of an old school point-and-click, with logic-based minigames thrown in. I have to confess I abandoned it two-thirds of the way through, mostly because I found some of the puzzles irritatingly challenging for a game with this sort of aesthetic. Not what I was looking for!
I’m only about halfway through based on a guide I was using, but I’m done with Cocoon. I enjoyed it at first. The art direction is gorgeous and the play mechanics are fun. The simple controls are particularly impressive.
The problem I have with it is that I kept getting stuck and having to refer to a walkthrough to make progress. When a game like this starts requiring new mechanics without introducing those new mechanics even with a visual clue, that’s a fatal flaw for me. Getting stuck without any clue that there might be something new I could do to progress is very frustrating for me. I feel like if I have to refer to a guide, the game is missing something important.
Maybe it’s my fault. I don’t play many puzzle games, so maybe there’s something in the design language that I’m just missing. Even so, I would really prefer some kind of guidance, even just a gentle nudge, when I’m running around trying different things that have no effect.
I find that sometimes you just aren’t on the same wavelength as the developers of some games. I was like that with Control (possibly because I’m a map person who’s first instinct is always to consult a map for new cities, etc and that games map is very poor.) The final straw was getting trapped in a room after a door locked behind me. I don’t think was even a puzzle but I just could not find my way out.
Puzzles where the solution is outside of the parameters of what has been set up are off putting though. I’m going to check out Cocoon sometime in the future as it’s from one of the people who did INSIDE.
Yeah, Control was very frustrating to navigate until gave up on the map and started following the signs. Which is thematically appropriate, but goes against conventional video game design.
Anyway, I finished Colony Ship, an indie crpg by the developers that did Age of Decadence. And yeah, it shows. It's prettier and more polished, but there's a decaying society split into factions, with the same approach to encounter and scenario design. You have party members this time around, but combat is still very dangerous (kinda obnoxiously so on the default difficulty tbh), but you can avoid all of it if you spec into stealth and social skills.
I don't think it has the same variability as Age of Decadence though.
I finished Vampire: The Masquerade - Justice over the weekend, a vampire-themed Dishonored clone in VR. I'm a Dishonored junky (Prey didn't grab me the same way, and I really did not enjoy Deadloop's FPS roguelike approach), and I absolutely loved having similar gameplay but in VR; it was everything I was dreaming of when I played Dishonored and thought "but think how much cooler this would be if I was really in Dunwall, creeping through the shadows!" It's funny, a lot of VR games use a teleport mode for movement, at least as an option, because it vastly reduces motion sickness for those prone to it, but when exactly the same mechanic is a Blink mechanic that allows you to instantaneously zip from the ground to hiding in the rafters (accompanied by a Nightcrawler-like cloud of smoke)? Chef's kiss. I could do that all day.
It's also - unlike most VR games, which tend to focus on a simple gimmick - a full game, with a surprising amount of levels, a story, good voice acting, a skill tree with advancing powers, optional approaches that unlock depending on skill choices, and a real feel of progression.
Unlike the Dishonored games, though, it has two boss fights, which I absolutely hated. To be fair, I pretty much think every game can be improved by just removing boss fights, and that's especially true of the majority of them which abandon all the skills you've been learning, improving, and enjoying throughout the game, and force you to play an entirely different style. Which is exactly what V:TM-J does - the developers thought that what people who enjoy stealth games would really like is to have all their stealth abilities torn away from them and be unable to progress until they get past a completely different style of gameplay. Ugh. This was exacerbated by a bug in one of the fights that meant I couldn't deliver the killing blow; multiple times I whittled the boss down to no health bar and they just stood around waiting for me to finish them off, but I couldn't, and we were both trapped in a locked arena, so I'd have to restart the boss fight all over again, die a bunch of times, only to once again be stuck. Eventually it magically worked and I could move on, but I hope the devs fix that ASAP (the game's only been out for two weeks).
If I ignore the boss fights, though (makes me long for the first Deus Ex, where you could literally stealth your way around a boss fight), and some of the launch jank, which tends to be more the norm with VR games that one would prefer, I absolutely adored the rest of the game. Most people are pegging it as a 6–8 hour game, but I put 25 hours into it, exploring every nook and cranny, and every possible route to all the targets. There's a strong hint at the end that they're hoping to make a sequel, and I'm absolutely on board if they do.
I find that sometimes you just aren’t on the same wavelength as the developers of some games. I was like that with Control (possibly because I’m a map person who’s first instinct is always to consult a map for new cities, etc and that games map is very poor.) The final straw was getting trapped in a room after a door locked behind me. I don’t think was even a puzzle but I just could not find my way out.
Puzzles where the solution is outside of the parameters of what has been set up are off putting though. I’m going to check out Cocoon sometime in the future as it’s from one of the people who did INSIDE.
FWIW, I felt exactly the same way as you did about Control and its terrible map, but I found Cocoon nearly perfectly tuned for my brain from start to finish. There was one puzzle near the end of the game that I ended up looking up, and predictably, I kicked myself for missing the then obvious solution.
The thing that can make some of Cocoon's puzzles a bit tricky is how many different components there are to keep track of. Once you unlock more than 2 different spheres, you have to start thinking about where several of them need to be at once to solve some of the puzzles. Because the spheres can be stacked like nesting dolls, you rarely have all of the puzzle pieces on screen at once which can make it difficult to visualize some of the solutions.
Finally got around to finishing Titanfall 2. That campaign deserves all the accolades it has gotten. The fact that nearly every level had a genre-breaking gimmick that could have been a full fledged game on its own. So incredibly ambitious, and it must have been a ton of work. All done at the highest AAA level.
Even better, it's running on the Source Engine, from 2004 - of course they're doing stuff that even Valve thought it wasn't capable of doing.
Completed nothing, but with emulation and purchases, my pile of shame had grown by about 40 this past week.
Pages