[blog] [blog] brnzen's Gaming Blog

Week of October 16th-22nd
New Games Added:
From the Abyss - Nintendo DS
Taiko no Tatsujin: Touch de Dokodon - Nintendo DS
Fast Food Panic - Nintendo DS

Completed Games:

428: Shibuya Scramble - Steam
Finished up 428 this week, getting all the achievements. I had 30+ hours in this game and had a lot of fun reading it. It was cool to see the two new stories for Stanley and Tateno in the final hour . Having gone into the game blind I was surprised by Canaan's storyline made by TYPE-MOON, and even more surprised that it had recieved a short anime series in 2009 shortly after the game's original Japanese release. The differing tone of the bonus stories (Suzune, Cannan, and Mean Clean) were fun to read through after the finale. I picked up 428: Shibuya Scramble after finishing another Spike Chunsoft published visual novel, Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward (trying to get a physical 3DS copy of Zero Time Dilemma) so I'd recommend 428 to anyone who enjoyed any of the Zero Escape games.

Outside the Window - Steam
This is a small arcade style high-score game I had gotten this year's steam summer sale. The game had no tutorial, but playing 2 or 3 rounds of high-score mode had me understand to stack like block types together, and to cap off columns with roofing decorations, trying to score a set amount of points each group of five blocks. I found myself really enjoying this puzzle game, having to plan out your tower a few moves ahead, and making sure you have a flat surface at the end of each layer so you don't screw up the beginning of the next layer. I managed to get all but one of the achievements, which was 'Score 500 points in high-score mode'. Spent about 3 hours in this game and had fun with it, but could only get my high-score up to around 375.

Tomorrow Won't Come For Those Without Sacrifice - Steam
Yes, that's what the title of this game looks like, with the blackspace characters, but here it's a spoiler tag with the true word that's revealed in-game. I'd played Aetherane's Hello Charlotte games earlier this year, which are also RPG Maker games in a similar style. Tomorrow Won't Come... follows suit with its religious themes and horror elements. I completed the game's two endings.

Summer Carnival '92 RECCA - Nintendo 3DS (Virtual Console - Famicom)
This game is a tough-as-nails shoot em' up, so naturally I employed the virtual console's save states quite a lot. RECCA is very impressive for a Famicom game, providing a challenging bullet hell on a system with a limited sprite count. Your player spaceship can shoot, or refrain from shooting to charge up a bomb, which is released by pressing the shoot button again. Enemies drop power-ups that shuffle between different shot types. Consecutively grabbing the same shot type increases it's power. Stage 4 of the game acts as a boss rush, broken up by short shooting segments to replenish power-ups. These bosses can be very difficult, especially the final one. The final boss shoots alternating barrages of rockets and energy bullets, the former of which home in on the player, making them super hard to avoid. I spent about 8 minutes reloading my save to get around one of the boss' rocket attacks, I commend those who can beat shoot em' ups in one go. I usually beat these types of games stage-by-stage if available. Such as Suguri which still took me 12 or so hours to beat accumulating all my attempts. Though I did beat Touhou 5 on normal mode with all characters. I plan to play more of the Touhou Project games in the future, I can't get enough of bullet hell games, even if I suck at some of them.

Focused Playing Games:

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call - Nintendo 3DS
After playing through quest medleys for a week or so, I managed to unlock all characters, including Chaos and Sephiroth. Before marking this game as complete, I'm planning to get an S or higher rank on every Basic and Expert level song with some Ultimate levels attempted, so that'll add a few more hours to my playtime. This includes seven DLC songs that I'd purchased. It was funny seeing a new version of this game announced for Switch recently, as I'm almost done with what I thought was the definitive version. Though it's cool that Final Bar Line is gonna have songs from more recent games life Final Fantasy XV, World of Final Fantasy, and Final Fantasy VII REMAKE.

Taiko no Tatsujin DS: Touch de Dokodon - Nintendo DS
This is the first Japanese game I've imported, second imported game in general after Another Code R. It has a good mix of tracks, with classical music, pop songs, and anime/game songs included. I have a similar benchmark with this game as with Theatrythm, getting gold crowns (100% notes landed) on all easy and medium songs, with hard songs attempted. There's six unlockable songs, to get I'll have to play the dojo mode (1 selected daily song) six times. I Definitely want to try out some of the other Taiko no Tatsujin games on DS, as the games following this one have even more songs and variety.

Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS - Nintendo 3DS
I played the Wii U version back when it first released, so it's cool to finally have picked up the alternate version of the game. I'm especially having fun with Smash Run mode. I'd heard people praise this mode and wish it was in the Wii U version before, but finally having tried it, I agree it's so much fun to play. Though my main, Robin, doesn't bode too well with their sluggish run speed in this huge map it's still a blast to explore the large area with enemies and treasure in it. I'm planning to complete the challenge boards, hopefully there aren't any locked behind online matches that I can't skip with a gold hammer.

Xmas Shooting - Scramble!! - Steam
A bullet hell game from Orange Juice, Xmas Shooting is a companion to their other game QP Shooting - Dangerous!!. This game features a holiday theme, with 3 stages. I'm playing stage-by-stage on normal difficulty, and am working on the final stage. Near the end of the stage is a fortress with lots of cannons trying to take you down, it's pretty difficult, especially when the camera begins panning downwards.

Puzzle Labyrinth - Nintendo 3DS
This game by Circle Entertainment is a dungeon crawler, with less of a combat focus, and more of a focus on puzzles. It contains 60 stages of varying difficulty. The puzzles are in many different styles, and for some the solutions are really obtuse/unintuitive. Many stages require you to interpret and follow a set of instructions scattered around as clues, and sometimes you'll have to resort to trial and error to figure out what item to use. Also, I needed to check a guide for one stage, as it has you defeat 3 enemies in an order that you would know from the historical book Romance of the Three Kingoms??? The hint you are given just says 'Three Kingdoms' so I guess the colors representing the three kingdoms in the novel are more widely known in Japan.

Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology - Nintendo 3DS
This game is very good and I definitely recommend it to any JRPG fan. I got this game during one of the two big SEGA/ATLUS sales on 3ds this January and April. Still hoping for a third one (maybe this holiday season?) so I can grab the rest of the Etrian Odyssey games after playing Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl. Back to Radiant Historia, I've gotten to Chapter 4 of both timelines, and have completed almost all of Nemesia's available tasks. As a story driven RPG, this game knocks it out of the park. I absolutely love the timeline chart that lets you review the story, and see what sidequests you still have left to complete. The combat system is great as well, being able to push enemies to the same tile and rack up combo attacks. I'm planning on getting the DLC missions for this game once I've completed the main story and completed most of the side material.

Week of October 23rd - 29th
New Games Added:
No Ghost in Stay Home - Steam
80's Overdrive - Nintendo 3DS
Go! Go! Kokopolo 3D: Space Recipe for Disaster - Nintendo 3DS
Children of Mana - Nintendo DS

Completed Games:

Xmas Shooting - Scramble!! - Steam
Completed Stage 3 of the game early this week after trying to get through it last time. I found that the 'Orbit' formation was helpful during the flying castle section, and after about a dozen tries I was able to take down the final boss.

No Ghost in Stay Home - Steam
This is a short point-and-click game I got for 50 cents this week. The game has a horror theme, and it contains some jumpscares. You play the game in 3 minute sections where tapping on certain objects causes things in the room to change, and depending on what you did, a different ending is played at the end of the 3 minutes. The gameplay here reminds me of the trilogy of Star Sky games, which also work in a loop with combinations of actions causing different endings. No Ghost in Stay Home was a part of Steam's Halloween event and had received an update adding 10 more endings on top of the 15 or so endings that had been included originally.

Murasaki - Steam
This game is a Shoot-em-up game, similar in gameplay/artstyle to Touhou Project. I really like the mechanic of this game, as its gameplay is a bit different from most bullet hell games. Instead of rapid firing projectiles to defeat enemies and dodge their bullets, your character can only shoot one projectile at a time, but your target it not to hit enemies directly, but hit blocks that will bounce around the stage and explode, hurting enemies and clearing bullets from the screen. If blocks ricochet into blocks of the same color, their explosions will become larger and more powerful. One thing I liked about this game is its great replay value, as each stage has multiple objectives to complete. Murasaki has two playable characters, and multiple endings. The good ending is reached if you allow the mid-bosses of each stage to time-out instead of defeating them, allowing the mid-bosses to team up as your final challenge during the good ending. The game also has a health bar system instead of 'X hits total' like other bullet hell games prefer. There are multiple challenges that encourage players to complete stages multiple times, such a duels, when you can choose to fight through two extra-challenging attacks from each boss. However, duels are only assessable if you managed to get through a portion of the boss fight without losing too much health. Hard-mode versions of the stages and an endless score mode are available after completing the game.

The Almost Gone - Steam
A short point-and-click puzzle game. It has a dark story, and I really liked some of the puzzles and mechanics, such as the pneumatic tubes in chapter 4.

Puzzle Labyrinth - Nintendo 3DS
I wrote about my gripes with this game last week, and honestly I'm glad to have marked it as complete. The puzzles in this game are really a mixed bag, some of them feel rewarding to complete, and others made me feel like I was guessing. Several puzzles will require you to use your items on an enemy in a specific order to defeat it, but only some will give you the order or a riddle revealing the order, so lots of times I would have to guess what items I needed to use. In about two or three stages, I was given an item that had no use in solving the room's puzzle, and I was able to complete the stage without applying it to anything. As I said last week lots of this game's puzzles feel less like puzzles and more like interpreting a set of instructions, often incomplete, forcing the player to resort to trial and error. I'll give an example of a confusing puzzle. In stage 50, there are three wells with purified, normal, and polluted water respectively. The hints of the stage are that you need to return a fish to the pond in the upper left of the stage, and that water can be dumped into a drain to empty a vessel. You are given a bucket and a bowl, that can be filled with water from the three wells. The bucket can hold two wells-worth of water. In order to get the fish, which is nowhere to be found, you need to fill the bucket with purified and normal water, then dump it down a drain that is hidden behind a wall, not the drain that is in plain sight. Only the bucket with those two types of water in it will cause the drain to spit out a magic wand. Next you fill up the bowl with pure water, and the bucket with normal + polluted water. Walk to the enemy in the bottom right, use the bucket and bowl on it, then use the magic wand on it, which turns it into the fish you need. Only this configuration of water types works, and if you do not use it, you have to start the level all over again. The level does not tell you that you are looking for a magic wand, what types of water need to be used on the hidden drain, or what types of water need to be used on the enemy. Most of the 'puzzle' in this stage is trial-and-error, which can also be said for many other stages. Puzzle Labyrinth is an eShop title that suffers from a severe lack of clarity, making only around half of its stages feel rewarding to complete.

Focused Playing Games:

Taiko no Tatsujin DS: Touch de Dokodon! - Nintendo DS
I have unlocked most of the 6 unlockable songs, I think I need one or two more. You can challenge the dojo to unlock a song once per day, and if you miss notes, you have to try again the next day. For the remaining unlockable songs, the dojo challenges are getting more difficult to complete. I'm having fun trying to get 100% notes on the songs I have unlocked.

Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS - Nintendo 3DS
Finished the first board of challenges and have moved on to the 2nd, I also have most characters unlocked. I think I'm missing Bowser Jr. and Ganondorf. Overall having a lot of fun with this game.

Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology - Nintendo 3DS
The story's really picking up in this game. I'm near the end of chapter 6 in the standard history, and partway through chapter 5 in the alternate history. I'm also going out of my way to do some of the side quests the game offers during the story. I'm still impressed at how this 3DS game has its whole main cast fully voice acted.

Week of October 30th - November 5th
New Games Added:
Mario's Picross 2 - Game Boy
Project Hacker - Kakusei - Nintendo DS

Completed Games:

Murasaki Tsurugi - Steam
Last week I played the first Murasaki, and I played the sequel this week. I'd say its just as fun as the original game, retaining all the same features, but improvements to the gameplay make the sequel my favorite out of the two. The boxes that the player needs to shoot to cause explosions no longer have a damage hitbox, so the player can pass through these larger objects to focus on dodging the enemy bullets. The stages also vary in size, in some stages, the walls are further apart or closer together, and they may move partway through a stage.

Attack of the Friday Monsters - Nintendo 3DS
This game is a short eShop title that is a part of Level-5's GUILD-01 series of published games on 3DS. You play as a 10 year old kid going around your town and helping people, as well as playing a simple card game. The card game follows a rock-paper-scissors format where each card has a type. You put down 5 cards and are not shown your opponent's cards. Then you are shown the result (win/loss/tie) of two matchups of you and your opponents cards. Each player is given a chance to swap two cards, then the hands + results are revealed. Whoever has the most wins out of five wins the game. I like the hand drawn backgrounds of the town the you are able to explore. The story was pretty nice, though it got hard to follow near the end, as I couldn't really tell if the game was implying that the player character was an unreliable narrator, and is dramatizing events that he doesn't understand because he's a little kid. I also liked looking around for the collectables needed to form the trading cards for the card game.

Focused Playing Games:

From the Abyss - Nintendo DS
This game is a dungeon crawling action RPG. It has a few drawbacks that leave it feeling pretty empty, but the general gameplay and mechanics are fun to play around with. Your character goes into one large dungeon (The Abyss) with your goal being to reach subsequent floors. If you warp back to the safe town, you can enter back at any floor you've started. The Abyss is broken up into areas, with four floors each, the fourth floor of each area being small and housing a boss fight. One of the fun features of From the Abyss its use of the bottom touch screen. You can manage your inventory and spells by dragging them around and tapping to use items. This allows you to swap what you have equipped on the fly. The game offers multiple weapon types, such as a sword, bow, axe, wand, and spear. You have spells that can be collected by equipping the 'absorb' spell (given to you by default) on enemies. This gives you a new spell for each new enemy type you encounter, which are generally introduced once per floor. I've been using the axe in my playthrough so far. The bottom screen has tabs which let you view your character's status and the map as well. Tabs can be switched by tapping them, but also with the L R shoulder buttons, which I found helpful in checking my map and experience points. The game tells you how much EXP you need to reach the next level, like other action RPGs such as Ys. Once you level up, your HP/MP increase, and you are given skill points that you can freely use to upgrade your choice out of your six stats. My main drawback with the game is that there seems to not be much of an incentive to explore paths of the dungeon once you've located the exit. I tried mapping the whole floor for the first two zones or eight floors, but decided to just reach the exit while fighting enemies for the next few. Split paths in the Abyss that are dead ends do lead to treasure chests, but no rewards in them are substantial enough to warrant seeking them out on purpose. The rewards found from chests (potions/sometimes weapons) are no different from those found occasionally from defeating enemies. Additionally, enemies also drop loot items that can be sold in the shop for money to buy better equipment. Most RPGs I've played have unique rewards in dead ends that incentivize exploration, such as items that cannot be bought from the shop, or items that you won't find commonly until later on. I think this game would benefit from using that principle. Heck, even having pots or crates that can be broken for 5 or 10 coins each scattered across the map would be an improvement. I also found the the healing spell is kinda busted, recovering a good 1/8 of your health bar for a relatively low mana cost. The spell is labeled 'Healing Lv. 1' so I may later find one even better. I like that there's a lot of enemy variety, as they have many different attack variations. Some simply charge at you, and other will back away or attack quickly so you need to focus on finding an opening. I've just completed the fourth zone of the Abyss, and am ready to start the fifth. I don't know how many more zones there are, but I expect maybe eight to ten.

Taiko no Tatsujin DS: Touch de Dokodon - Nintendo DS
Reading a guide, I figured out how the dojo works more clearly. Before I had assumed that you unlock the six new songs by getting all notes on six dojo challenges, but that wasn't true. Each time you play at the dojo, your profile rank rises, based on how well you did on the daily dojo challenge, not requiring all notes to be landed. I'm guessing that I'll need to play the game for a few minutes each day to get my rank up from bronze (maybe? I can't read it.) to the highest rank. I still have a lot of hard/oni level songs to try to get crowns for as well.

Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS - Nintendo 3DS
Unlocked all characters and the third challenge board. Still working to clear the boards. I'm going to try to avoid using golden hammers unless I really have to. I've only used one so far, and that was for 'Get five hits on Streetpass' which would be very hard considering how few people carry around a 3DS, especially in 2022.

Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology - Nintendo 3DS
Got a little further in chapter 6 of the standard history, and midway through chapter 6 of the alternate history. I also have most of Nemesia's available quests completed, and am trying to finish some side quests between nodes in the white chronicle.

Week of November 6th - 12th
New Games Added:
Tag: The Power of Paint - Steam
Beach Island Deluxe - Steam
Jotun: Valhalla Edition - Steam
Luxor 2 - Steam
Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Nintendo 3DS

Completed Games:

From the Abyss - Nintendo DS
Cleared all eight abyss areas and completed the game. As I said last week, the combat in this game is fun, but is lacking solid level design to make it a great action dungeon crawler. There's an episodic sequel that was released on DSiWare, so I'll check that one out sometime soon.

Tag: The Power of Paint - Steam
You may recognize this title as the one that inspired the colored gels in Portal 2. As a student project, it is not very large, but the handful of levels showcase the mechanics very well. Tag contains a type of paint not seen in Portal 2's final release, which allows you to walk on walls that have been painted with it. The UI contains an arrow when walking on walls, letting you see which way is down as to not make players easily disoriented. The game is free on steam and I believe the project has only recently been made available on steam, previously only being a free download on the publisher's website. The publisher, DigiPen Institute of Technology, has put out a lot of their students' projects as free downloads on steam, so go see if any of them pique your interest.

Beach Island Deluxe - Steam
Another project from DigiPen, this game is a short 3D platformer taking inspiration from Mario's star collecting games like Super Mario 64, Sunshine, and most closely Odyssey. It has fifteen stars to collect, with seven being the minimum needed to complete the game. The stars are scattered across the island and there are fun platform challenges to complete in order to reach them. One thing I like about this game is how the player character's hat changes color to show how many jumps you have left, it gives the player clarity on how far they can jump and when they have touched a solid platform.

Evan's Remains - Steam
Evan's Remains is a puzzle-platform game, and follows a woman who has come to a deserted island to find the titular Evan. The story was pretty good and had a few twists that I wasn't expecting, but I think my favorite part of the game was its puzzle design. The game's puzzles work with stone platforms that have an on/off state (solid/un-interactive). Jumping off of a stone platform switches its state, and different platforms can swap the state of all stone platforms or cause a platform to move to a different spot. The mechanics are introduced wordlessly, and the puzzles very well designed, not being incredibly easy, but solidly testing your grasp of the mechanics you've encountered. While I didn't use it, the game has a great accessibility option of skipping puzzles. It's nice to see options like this so anyone can enjoy the full story of the game without getting stuck partway through.

Focused Playing Games:

Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology - Nintendo 3DS
I reached the standard ending of the game this week, and am well on my way to clearing all base game content with about 55 hours in my playthrough. The post-game of Radiant Historia is pretty fun, and I found that the difficulty curve still gives the player a challenge when fighting against the enemies and bosses in Possible History's labyrinth, the point in the game that I am at right now. I believe that I have nearly all of the side material, not missing any of the side quests that weren't required to gather the artifacts and begin to restore the Red Chronicle. The only one I'm missing is the battle against Master Vainqueur after bringing him all of the pacts. I couldn't beat him right before I started the Red Chronicle Labyrinth, but I should be on more even footing after I'm finished with it. I expect to finish the base game 100% early this week, then I'm gonna play the DLC stories.

Radiant Historia is such a great game with an awesome story and characters. And the voice acting is just... high quality and amazing. I never finished it, but I definitely need to get back to it when I feel like playing a game on my 3DS again.

Week of November 13th-19th
New Games Added:
Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology DLC - Nintendo 3DS
-Under the Moonlight
-Rage of the Fallen
-Meeting in the Chasm
-Settling the Score

Completed Games:

Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight - Steam
I played the original trilogy of Momodora games way earlier this year, and it was really cool to see how much this game improved on its predecessors. The original trilogy's games were short metroidvanias, with a somewhat linear structure. Reverie Under the Moonlight is a huge step up, having very well made pixel art graphics as well as great music and level design. All of the boss battles were fun challenges and, I liked how the four pieces of the crest needed to open the door to the final area also gave you new abilities, none of the abilities were required to progress to get the other pieces, so they could be collected in any order you wanted to. I had a lot of fun with this game and went out of my way to find the hidden collectables + the optional boss fight.

Radiant Historia Perfect Chronology (+ Four DLC Episodes) - Nintendo 3DS
I've talked about Radiant Historia for the past few weeks that I've been playing it, and I really can't recommend it enough to anybody with a 3DS. The story is great, the voice acting is superb, and the grid battle system with stacking combos is very fun. Picking up from last time, I was able to beat Master Vainqueur which was very challenging, but I was able to get through it after having my party equipped with items that booster Magic-Defense. After that I completed the quest following Vainqueur's battle to get the final upgrade for Historica, which was not as challenging, but still took me 2-3 tries. I also completed the good ending of the story, defeating the source of desertification and saving the world. I got through what I'd consider 100% of the game, filling out all story nodes and quests in the White Chronicle and all of Nemesia's quests. There is also some content exclusive to the ending of New Game+, but as much as I like this game, I'm not really motivated to play it all again to fight a super-boss. I also bought four of the five DLC episodes. The one I skipped is a Fan-Service event where you go to a hot spring or whatever, which I really am not interested in. Of the four DLC episodes that I did buy, I'd say that Settling the Score was my favorite, and the one I'd recommend buying if you just want one. Each of the DLC episodes cost $2.50 except for the one I skipped which is $4. I think that literally the only negative thing I could say about Radiant Historia is the level scaling for its DLC episodes. All of them take place ambiguously "in an possible history after the war is won" and contain references to late game plot points. The DLC menu even says that the episodes contain spoilers for endgame content, so I waited until I completed the game to play the DLC. Bizarrely, most of the DLC episodes have a recommended level of 20-30, which is where you'd be in the main game when party members in the DLC are first introduced to your party. Playing the DLC after the end of the game (as was suggested by the game itself?) I was totally over-leveled and breezed through the bonus boss battles that were presented. I suggested Settling the Score as the one you should get above the others because it has a recommended level of 60+ and features a very challenging boss rush. I'd have preferred if you were given a preset party separate from your main save data for the DLC or something, so you could complete them without feeling like they were super easy. I guess it goes to show how good Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology is if the only critique I have is that difficulty scaling in the DLC is weird. It's become one of my favorite 3DS games. If SEGA/ATLUS ever does another one of those huge sales on 3DS before the eShop kicks the bucket, grab this game for like $10. Thinking about it I spent the same on the full game than I did on the DLC, and it would have been more than the full game if I got the hot spring one as well, lol.

The Midnight Sanctuary - Steam
The Midnight Sanctuary is a sequel?/prequel?/side-story? to another game by the same developer, This Starry Midnight We Make. The latter game was a puzzle game, where you'd place stars into an alchemy cauldron and configure them in different ways to create a bunch of celestial objects, which had 2D visual novel cutscenes. The Midnight Sanctuary is fully a visual novel (with complete voice acting) in 3D. This game's predecessor had a unique visual effect, where in the cutscenes, each character had a mask (as in the graphics/art type) on part of their outfit. It made a pattern slowly scroll across their shirt/vest/etc. which was unique and I thought it was pretty cool. The Midnight Sanctuary also uses a very similar technique in a 3D environment, as the villagers of the town you're visiting all wear cloaks that mask a static background layer. When they characters move, they expose different parts of the background. The story itself is kinda odd, but was fun to see through to the end of the 3-3.5 hour experience. Our protagonist Hamomoru, has arrived in a remote village on a trip to learn more about its culture and help generate tourism for the place, which gets very few visitors. The player is not Hamomoru herself, but a tour guide that follows her around, and sometimes eavesdrops on other characters when Hamomoru goes back to her hotel room. This tour guide plays into another feature I'll bring up later. As Hamomoru explores the village she is able to learn about its strange religious beliefs. The villagers show incredible hospitality to guests, as long ago a visitor saved them from a great famine. Early on the the game, I noticed the about half of the villagers masked a background that was in color, while the other half masked a greyscale of the same backdrop. I thought this was odd and suspected it had some signifigance, and it turns out I was right! Around the end of chapter two, it's revealed that much of the village is populated by ghosts (the colorful ones) and the living (greyscale). To summarize the story, Hamomoru meets another visitor who is looking for a hidden treasure in the village. They join forces and try to unravel the mystery of the ghosts populating the village and where the treasure is hiding. Hamomoru works with the village priest and the village chief's son to create events that will draw in tourists. Things go awry when a strange little girl (referred to as a saint) arrives in the town and begins "rapturing" the ghosts to heaven. The villagers go crazy, the ghosts are ecstatically waiting their turn, and much of the living population become ghosts themselves. As the tour guide, you play a part in a plan with the other major characters to banish this saint away from the village. The game ends with Hamomoru and the treasure hunter waving farewell to the village priest as they head back to their homes. The priest hopes to increase tourism by marketing the village as 'a place where the Dead walk' to let tourists meet a real ghost. Here's where the interesting thing about the tour guide comes in. The game can be played as a standard visual novel (the way that I played it) with the camera at set angles in the 3D space to best capture what's going on it each shot. What's interesting is that it also has a VR mode, where you see through the eyes of the tour guide and stand directly in the scene with the other characters. This is a pretty cool concept, and I know for sure there's plenty of VR games where you exist in a scene and watch a story play out around you, this is the first time I've seen a game where you can also play in a more standard VN format. There's a couple scenes in the game that work well with the preset camera angles, but I could tell they were designed to look really cool in VR, such as the part where the tour guide is taunted in a vision by the saint. They stand in the middle of a hexagonal room, and while the saint talks, she opens up the six walls in sequence revealing a scene in each one. I'd expect you'd be looking all around when you hear the walls rising and shutting behind you. Overall it was a pretty cool short story, and while I preferred This Starry Midnight We Make in terms of gameplay, this game was enjoyable too. A couple of funny things about The Midnight Sanctuary before I close out the review. While the villagers are all wearing cloaks and are pretty much indistinguishable besides their voices and headbands, there's something I noticed about the main character's 3D models. The proportions for their hands are super weird. They're a bit bigger compared to their arms, and the fingers are super lanky, like freaking E.T. fingers, which is most apparent on the treasure hunter, who curls her fingers in her idle animation. The other thing was that I first tried to play this game on my laptop, but it kept crashing within the first 20 seconds of the opening cutscene. It just pooped its pants trying to render the masking effect, which is also used on bodies of water, fire particles, and the roofs of buildings.

Focused Playing Games:

Sora - Steam
This is a prequel to Orange Juice's earlier game, Suguri. I'm nearly finished with Sora, just on Star Breaker's boss battle, which I'm sure will take me a few more attempts, as I've gotten to her last phase only once or twice out of a dozen or two attempts. Sora takes after Suguri in its mechanics, which are unique in shoot-em-ups, and I've gotten a lot of fun out of from both games. Your weapons have a short cooldown, so its not best to hold down Z all the time. Other shmups are primarily focused on dodging enemy bullets with not as much emphasis on your own shots. Sora's cooldowns incentivize timing your shots to take out each enemy. Enemy bullets can be energy bullets or live ammo. Live Ammo can be broken by shooting at it but is solid and will always hit you if contact is made. Energy bullets can be dodged through without taking damage by dashing, but will still hurt you if you're not dashing. Dashing through energy will charge up your hyper meter, that lets you store up to 3 powerful hyper attacks at once. Dashing also builds up a heat percentage while you use it, which multiplies the damage taken from your health bar the higher the percent (up to 300%). The percentage drops when not dashing, so it's best to not hold down the dash button to clear all energy without breaking. With these mechanics, Sora (and by extension Suguri) put a really fun twist on the shoot-em-up formula, emphasizing strategy of movement and attacking. So far, I'm finding Sora to be a bit easier than it's predecessor, but not so much that it becomes frustrating. When I played Suguri in December of 2021 and January of 2022, I played on Story mode (stage-by-stage individually) on easy difficulty. Even this was super challenging, as I remember taking thirty to forty to fifty attempts to clear stages three and above, barely surviving with a sliver of life left on each one. You had to put a lot of thinking into considering each stage boss' attack patters and predicting when you'd have good openings, as well as the big robot mid-bosses and unique stage gimmicks while fighting through to the stage boss. The game was super challenging, on easy mode beating sequential stages, but I felt really accomplished beating each one. I can only imaging how much goes into doing arcade mode for these types of games regularly where if you lose you start over all the way at stage one. I do arcade mode sometimes when I play shmups, like in Touhou Project, but I'll opt for stage-by-stage when it's available and arcade mode keeps kicking my butt. I ended up putting over 10 hours into it, maybe around 12, I can't remember off the top of my head. I found Sora's Story mode to be much easier, and each stage to be more forgiving. It still takes me four or five tries to beat each stage (aside from the one I'm on right now), but I feel confident in memorizing the patterns and using my weapons/dash strategically. While I felt super accomplished beating each stage in Suguri (audibly going "Yes! I got it!" When the boss's health hits zero and the stage ends) I'm glad that Sora isn't as frustrating. Though there's a different kind of enjoyment to be gained from both experiences.

Diadra Empty - Steam
This is another Shoot-em-up, published by Rockin' Android, who had published Suguri before Orange Juice moved to Fruitbat Factory for publishing on Steam. Skip to the lower bold text if you don't wanna read me ranting about my laptop. When I first started playing this on my laptop, I thought I'd encountered some major bug, because the game kept crashing in stages seven or eight. Much of the Steam discussion page was complaints about frequent bugs and crashes, so I thought I may have encountered that, but these messages were from years ago and other comments said the bugs were patched in 2016, and that the game was now stable. Turns out my laptop was having a hard time with this one, which I suspect is because of the barrages of not just bullets but enemies and the particles they leave as well. I really have no clue what my laptop's tolerance to graphics is because it seems to be all over the place. This game and The Midnight Sanctuary caused problems because of large numbers of sprites/masks. A lot of 2D games run fine, and Tokyo Xanadu EX+ runs without trouble, being a 3D game on standard graphics settings. I also tried loading Clustertruck which crashed immediately. My laptop's really picky, I'll tell you what. Down Here! Hi! Okay I'll tell you about the game now. Diadra Empty is a shoot-em-up with a large playing field. You can scroll left and right for about 7 screens, and up and down for 3 or so. The game compounds a couple of mechanics to make a really fun experience. Enemies will attack from all sides, so you've got to be on your toes and watch the minimap to locate waves of enemies outside of your screen's view. Defeating enemies gives you exp and gold, which can be spent on upgrades. I find the system for collecting exp/gold to be really fun, because rather than being immediately increased when you defeat an enemy, the exp/gold appear as orbs that fly out of the enemy, and you've gotta pick them up. The range that these orbs are attracted to your character is pretty small when you're in the middle of shooting, however when you stop shooting for a second or two, the range of pickup increases by like 4x, giving the player a risk/reward decision to get these important materials. Gaining exp gives you subtle attack and speed boosts and gives you and extra bomb attack (called a stormboost here). To strengthen your character, what you really need is gold. It is spent between stages for upgrades, which include boosts to speed, attack power, pickup range/speed ,and options (which give you more bullets per shot). There's a couple of other neat features too. You have a rechargeable dash, which makes you invulnerable for a few seconds and boosts you forward. There are multiple control schemes to choose from. I use control scheme 3, which has one button to shoot left, and another button to shoot right. The other options seem to unintuitive or complex to be any fun. They other two control schemes have you always shoot the direction you're facing, or another than lets you lock shooting to one direction or unlock it to shoot the direction you're facing. Multiple shot types are available such as standard bullets, lasers, and short range flames that deal a lot of damage. You can also choose a configuration for the extra bullets provided by the option upgrade. All this compounds into a really fun game with huge imposing bosses and hordes of enemies that take up more than can be seen on one screen. In the third (I think?) phase of stage 8 there is a dragon that takes up a huge portion of the screen and you have to attack each of its arms, legs, tail, etc. separately to take it down. That's the farthest I got on my laptop, and on my PC I'm at the last phase (hopefully...) of stage 8. It has a huge crystal protected by shields, and you need to hit smaller orbiting crystals to break the first shield while the main one attacks you with tough bullet patterns. The next phase requires you to collect 100 or so pickups from enemies that spawn in between each attack pattern. I think this boss battle is really neat because it employs a lot of the game's mechanics, so upgrading your skills equally can help you succeed in the fight. That's as far as I've got, and it's really good so far. There's supposed to be two bonus stages that are harder and can be challenged separately from the eight main stages. Another thing I like is the story. The story is not very upfront, your exposition is that this girl is riding on a dragon to save her sister who died/was captured/sacrificed I'm not sure of the specifics but she's in custody of the boss dragons/monsters and you need to save her. Beyond this exposition, all other story is told through short lines at the start of each stage, one from the player character, and one from her sister. The player character will talk about her determination and how she cares for her sister, while the sister demands that you head back, as she doesn't want you to get hurt for her sake. The short exchanges are all really poetic and sweet. They show up on screen for only a few seconds, giving you hardly any time to read all of the words. A different game that uses a very similar way of telling its story is Ikaruga, another shoot-em-up game. It was originally a cult classic arcade game that was ported to other platforms. I played it on steam a while ago. You're given very little upfront story, only statements from the pilot of the ship you play as motivating themself to keep going and defeating the enemy ships. Apparently, Ikaruga has several named characters and a backstory to the battle you're fighting, but none of it is brought up in the game at all. When I played it on Steam, it had an 'extras' menu with illustrations of the characters and ships, but I really don't know where the story information comes from, just that it does have a story that exists. The way these two games tell their story is really cool, and still manages to make the motivations and emotions of the characters feel impactful, even if the characters themselves and the world the story is set take a backseat to let the gameplay be upfront. I'll probably finish Diadra Empty by next week, but who knows, maybe this boss or the bonus stages will be really tough.

Arkanoid DS - Nintendo DS
This is a follow-up to a classic arcade game on the Nintendo DS. The Arkanoid series is about brick-breaking, like Breakout on Atari, but a lot cooler and with power ups and stuff. As with other games in this series, you play as Vaus, a spaceship that acts as the paddle for the ball you bounce back and forth. Also, unlike previous games (I'm pretty sure) this is the first time you see the pilot of Vaus, a little alien named Ananke. They look like a little dude with an antennae with a ball on it, the closest I'd compare them to is a cross between Bomberman and the prince from Katamari Damacy. The game has a nice single player mode, as well as a multiplayer option, but I'll be focusing on single player. The campaign is split into zones of five rounds, twenty-eight in total, from A to Z, along with V' and Z'. The latter two I assume are V prime and Z prime. You always start in zone A, then you can choose from two zones for your next set of rounds. The zones are arranged in an upside down triangle, so after playing zone B or C, there are three zones on the third level, but which two of them you can access depends on what you chose for your second zone. There are seven zones you play through in a single campaign, so 35 rounds. Each of the stages on the seventh level (V,W,X,Y,Z,V',Z') you can rescue one of your alien guy's friends, each of them a different color. You'd need to play the campaign seven times to rescue them all, but there's enough variety in the paths you can take that I haven't found it to be repetitive. The actual brick breaking stages are are fun, and the power ups help keep it interesting. I also like that when you fail a round you don't have to restart the whole zone, you just go to the beginning of the stage. You can also suspend your save data for the campaign and return to it later. This is a nice feature, considering the Nintendo DS' portable nature, combined with the fact that a run of the campaign's 35 rounds takes an hour and fifteen minutes or so. There's also a challenge mode, where after completing a round in the campaign you can try to beat a challenge version of it. These challenges are disconnected from the campaign so you can play them at one at a time. The challenges are things like "clear the round in 45 seconds" and "break all orange blocks while letting the ball hit the paddle only 8 times". There's a real variance in difficulty with the challenges, which is cool, so I expect to spend some time on them after clearing all the campaign endings. The game also has a great visual style to it. Multiple old arcade/puzzle titles got entries on the DS, such as Tetris DS, Planet Puzzle League, as well as Space Invaders Extreme and its sequel. All these games gave some cool visual flair to their formula, Tetris DS and Planet Puzzle League offer nice music and lots of borders and backgrounds to choose from. Tetris DS additionally has Nintendo character themed backgrounds and music, based on their most popular NES games. While those two games are cool, they're nothing compared to Space Invaders Extreme. This game goes all in on the Y2K zeitgeist, with its music, menu design, fonts, and really everything comes together to make a package with a prominent and consistent sense of style. Arkanoid DS similarly has Y2K elements, and does a good job at portraying it. I'd say it's a second place to Space Invaders Extreme in "Puzzle/Arcade game entries on DS that make cool stylistic choices to a simple gameplay formula. One thing I especially like about Arkanoid DS is its music. There's one track for each zone layer of the campaign, and these tracks also play on those zone's rounds in challenge mode. What surprised me about the music is the amount of vocals that were used. Really the last thing I would have guessed was good vocals in an Arkanoid game on DS. The song 'Fairy Reflection' has full lyrics and is a really nice song. Most of the other stages use a varying degree of sampled vocals, except for the seventh zone's track which is a instrumental song with a metal guitar. There's one song that I really can't tell what the sampled voice is saying. I think it's "like an avalanche" but with the 3DS speakers and headphones I can't make out what the guys voice says. Overall a fun game that surprisingly surprisingly has me hooked playing the campaign multiple times back to back, the gameplay and music are just that enjoyable.

Week of November 20th-26th
New Games Added:
BAD END THEATER - Steam
Celestial Hacker Girl Jessica - Steam
Ord. - Steam
The Travel Game - Steam
OXXO - Steam
Judgement Silversword: Rebirth Edition - Steam
Cardinal Sins: Recycle Edition - Steam
Guilty Gear - Steam
Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R - Steam
An Octave Higher - Steam
Riptide GP: Renegade - Steam
Rosenkruzstilette - Steam
Rosenkruzstilette Fraudenstachel - Steam
Super Ledgehop: Double Laser - Steam
Gensou Skydrift - Steam
Assemble with Care - Steam
Transiruby - Steam
Hatsune Miku: Project Diva Megamix+ (with Extra Song Pack DLC) - Steam
Mr. Rainer’s Solve-It Service - Steam
AaAaAA!!! – Reckless Disregard for Gravity DLC: Brutal Concussion - Steam
Touhou 6: Embodiment of Scarlet Devil - PC Direct Download
Touhou 7: Perfect Cherry Blossom - PC Direct Download
Guilty Gear Isuka - Steam
Art of Gravity - Steam
PUSH - Steam
Hook 2 - Steam
Vasara - Steam
Vasara 2 - Steam
FAST Racing Neo - Wii U
Gabrielle's Ghostly Groove - Nintendo 3DS
New Replays Added:
Ynglet - Steam
Zenge - Steam

Additional Notes:
Yep, that's a lot of new additions. I guess it's expected when there's a big steam sale, and I used a gift card that I'd gotten earlier and hadn't spent on anything. Picked up a lot of cool titles at the fall sale, and I'm not planning to splurge on a bunch of Steam games until at least the 2023 Summer Sale. I was at home this week so I was able to use my PC rather than my laptop, so I was able to complete Diadra Empty. Another game that I had tried to run on my laptop was CINERIS SOMNIA, but it had errors trying to run the 3D graphics even on the lowest setting, having pitch black tris poking out of polygons in the environment. I decided to play it on my home PC, but I didn't have enough time this week to play the whole 10+ hour game, so I'm saving for my next longer break. Another thing is that I picked up a second DS stylus at home. I'm going to use it for Taiko no Tatsujin: Touch de Dokodon! Because it's meant to be played with two styluses, and two Don-chan themed styluses were originally packaged with the game (which I don't have). Hopefully playing in the intended way will help me clear hard level songs with silver crowns and raise my dojo rank quicker.

Completed Games:

BAD END THEATER - Steam
Another game with a flowchart of branching paths is always nice to see, it's one of my favorite mechanics. BAD END THEATER stars four actors in a standard fantasy/RPG setting. You choose one of the four to play as, then make a few decisions (up to four or so) which leads you to a bad ending. Each ending doesn't take too long to reach, anywhere from 4-7 minutes, and there's 41 of them to uncover. A cool feature of the game is that which ending you get is not only dependent on what choices you make as your chosen actor, but also what choices are made by the other three actors, who are acting parallel to you. Once a choice is made by the player, it can be toggled on the actor select menu. For example, if you play as HERO and decide to defeat the demons in your path, you'll get one ending. Then, you can toggle HERO's traits so that dutiful and heroic are on. Next, if you start the story as UNDERLING, you'll witness HERO's slaughter of the demons and gain an ending related to confronting or fleeing from the HERO. You can mix and match toggles to try and find endings, and you can also look at the aforementioned flowchart of each actor. It will show you what sequence of toggles/choices are needed to find the endings you're missing and have already seen. The flowchart isn't an easy guide that tells you everything, as paths will only be shown when you have seen the circumstances and choices that will lead to that ending. Multiple sets of endings depict the same situation, but from the perspective of each actor that is involved. The game's art style is pretty cute, with great actor designs. I especially like the design of the UNDERLING, they're silly, and their design matches their attitude. The UNDERLING is pretty cool as well, as they're nonbinary, and it's always nice to see NB characters in indie games. Even when there's like PG-13 violence and blood, the style stays consistent. The game's music is very nice and uses motifs for each actor. You'll hear the actor's standard theme at the start of their story, then as you progress, you'll hear versions that match situations that are sad, scary, angry, and so on. Some of my favorite songs are the MAIDEN's theme, as well as the song that plays during the boss fight against TRAGEDY. This fight uses actor sprites in a lineless style distinct from the game's other illustrations, which look really cool and surprised me when they first showed up. Also, each actor's path uses a distinct color palate, each being different shades of orange, purple, blue, and red. These palates blend together in each actor's initial "true" endings, using a mix of the four colors, which was a surprise and accentuates the tension as the four are all on edge, trapped in a burning castle. The real true ending was really sweet, it was nice to hear TRAGEDY's backstory, and for there to be a completely good ending, where the four actors are living happy lives, and TRAGEDY is reunited with her girlfriend.

Diadra Empty - Steam
Finished this game from last week since I'd played it on my PC this time instead of my laptop which crashed a bunch around the middle of stage 8. One thing that I mentioned last time was that I liked how the final boss against the crystal thing had a phase where you needed to collect a bunch of pickups to make it vulnerable. Turns out I was completely wrong on that one, whoops. I'd assumed that was the case, because there was a counter displaying my pickups so far for the boss fight, and the crystal's health bar had not gone down no matter how much I shot at it. This pickup counter is purely statistical and doesn't progress the boss fight once you get 100 or whatnot. The reason I didn't see the boss' health bar draining was because it had so much health (making the health bar stretch off of the screen) that I lost all my lives before I could see it visibly be reduced for the first 3 attempts from stage 1 to the crystal boss in stage 8. The crystal has like 50,000 HP in its last phase, and the health bar depletes enough to be seen on screen around 15,000 HP. I figured this out when I figured out that one of the counters next to the boss was the numerical value of its HP. I switched around my weapons a few times and was able to finish the boss fight with the large missile like shot (which leaves a damaging area of effect for a second or two) and shield options in the forward formation. The ending is bittersweet, as you are not able to bring your sister home, but you are able to visit her spirit for a brief moment. She tells you that there's no bringing back the dead, but through your efforts and relentless care for her, she's learned to not despair over her short life any longer. She thanks you, saying that she's happy that you helped her respect and love herself, and gives you a hug. She wishes you farewell and says she'll happily wait for the day you come back to the sky in the proper time, before letting go of your hands, letting you fall home to earth. Overall, it was a pretty fun game, with a uniquely large play area, and good replay value. After the ending, I unlocked true mode, a harder difficulty that standard mode. I tried playing true mode a few times, but it was very hard, and I gave it my best shot.

Celestial Hacker Girl Jessica - Steam
This is an oddball game I got during the steam sale for 99 cents. It's made up entirely of pre-made Unity store assets, all music, sounds, models, and textures are taken from the unity store and the credits list the authors of all the items from the Unity store. This way of making a game reminded me of some narration from Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. Early on in Getting Over It, (The farthest I've gotten is partway up the section after you go up a slide and under some shelving full of packages) Foddy describes his game as a B-Game, akin to a B-Movie. B-Games are said to be made with little effort into art or sound but containing solid gameplay that clearly had heart put into it. Getting Over It uses Unity assets just like Celestial Hacker… does. I'm not sure if some music/sounds are original, but all the models are sourced from the Unity Store, as well as sampling (assumingly) royalty-free music from the middle of the 20th century. I think that Celestial Hacker Girl Jessica does a good job at exemplifying this B-Game concept. As does Getting Over It, this game uses various models in ways that they likely weren't originally intended to make a bizarre, but enjoyable (or frustrating in Getting Over It's case) area to play in. You play as Jessica, who is a nearly featureless pink marble. The game is a 3D platformer, and you roll around, having great moment when you start moving, and will skid a little when pressing the shift key to brake and stop in place if you were going fast enough. Your goal is to reach a cake at the end of 36 levels. Mechanics like bouncing floors, enemy lasers, and climbable vines are introduced, as well as the "hacking" which is done by rolling across the keyboard of computers found in the levels, which unlocks barriers. The stage design is very good, expanding upon the mechanics introduced, fitting the B-Game definition pretty well. Some examples of creative use of its assets are a huge rainbow skeleton that grabs the player and blows them up if they fall off the map, and a model of a steam train engine that has a collectible inside, but the train is not meant to be platformed up by a small character, requiring precise jumps on its varied/bumpy exterior. The collectibles are cans of soda and different colored marbles you can find in most levels. Collecting a soda brings you to a warp zone where you can change to an unlocked marble color or jump ahead to later levels if you've found a certain amount of sodas. Celestial Hacker Girl Jessica is a short, but fun platformer that does a good job of employing its mechanics and represents the "B-Game" definition quite well.

Ord. - Steam
Ord. Minimalist. Game.
Text. Adventure. Type.
Multiple. Stories. Variety.
Quest. Story. Main.
Many. Endings. Choices.
Anything. Could. Deadly.
Mostly. Humor. Stories.
100%. RNG. Frustrating.
Filters. Apply. Situation.
Planet. Story. Fun.
Dimensions. Story. Humor.
Heist. Story. Confusing?
Foul. Things. Story.
Foul. Well. Written.
Creative. Use. Medium.
Foul. Long. Story.
Feels. Choice. Book.
Overall. Fun. Concept.

The Travel Game - Steam
This game is by the same developer as one I played a little while ago, No Ghost in Stay Home. The Travel Game shares a similar structure where you can raise/lower the ghost aura to make it scarier, the gameplay is more involved than No Ghost in Stay Home. When you start playing, a girl named Rita will let you ask her 5 questions, and will lie once in her answers. You can ask what the place she traveled to was like, or if she has already used her lie. Once you've asked your questions you can choose from six locations (island, mountains, snowy field, desert, swamp, plains) and Rita will tell you if you're correct. On round two, you can ask Rita questions like, "Are you afraid of ghosts?" or "Was that something behind you?" to raise the ghost aura. In the next round the room will be spookier and you can raise the aura again by clicking on ghosts in the background. Rita's responses to your questions become more cryptic and spooky at medium ghost aura, but can still be used to deduce the place she visited. After clicking on ghosts, you go to high ghost aura, where it's even more spooky, jumpscares are frequent, and your choices for locations are horror themed with appropriate responses from Rita. You can get eight endings by finishing all five rounds in different ways. There are endings for getting all questions right at low aura, getting the answer wrong at high aura, or returning to low aura after reaching high by getting questions correct. The deduction game is fun to play and its rules tied with ghost aura, make The Travel Game a short, but engaging horror game.

OXXO - Steam
This game, and a couple others I got this week were a part of the "Relaxing Puzzle Box" bundle. A few of the games in it I already had, so I got the rest of the collection. All these games follow a similar pattern. OXXO, as with the others, starts with a simple puzzle concept, expands on it in different ways, then incorporates multiple of these mechanics into the same level. All the games in the bundle do this, and it works well to create solid puzzle games with great design that are about 2 hours long each. OXXO specifically is about moving tiles so that like shapes are adjacent, while differing pairs of shapes are not adjacent. This is expanded upon in multiple ways, so that later puzzles are much more complex than earlier ones. I'd say my favorite mechanic in OXXO is how two tile wide pieces cannot be rotated manually, and need to be pushed into a corner or another piece to force it to turn.

Sora - Steam
I finished up Sora this week, completing the main story as well as the extra stage. Last time I had been trying to beat Star Breaker in the last main story stage. I think that I forgot to mention last time, but her stage has a really nice vocal song. After some more attempts, I was able to beat Star Breaker. The extra stage was even harder than Star Breaker though. You have to fight both Hime and Suguri, the latter being the protagonist of this game's predecessor. Beating this stage took so many attempts, but I had fun with it, because both bosses have really good theme music, and Hime's fight in the original Suguri game was my favorite. After only reaching Suguri's half of the fight a couple times with the weapon loadout I had used on star breaker, I tried switching up my weapons and found one that was really helpful. The "Bullet" weapon shoots a condensed spread of bullets that can deal a lot of damage if used at close range. Also, it was only halfway through my attempts on the extra stage that I realized that Hime's blade attacks were not all live ammo as opposed to her regular bullets. The both blades cannot be broken by shooting at them, but red blades are safe to dash through, while blue blades are not. This helped a lot in clearing Hime's hypers in her second and third phases. Suguri's fight takes place in a big arena similar to the 1v1 spinoff game Acceleration of Suguri. After beating the extra stage, you are treated to a cutscene, and the title screen is changed from a cloudy sky to a clear one. The game's logo is changed to add Suguri II. I really enjoyed my time with Sora, it's story is very good, and did a lot to expand upon the formula the first game.

Zenge - Steam [replay]
This is another game from the "Relaxing Puzzle Box" bundle. A lot of what I wrote for OXXO applies here too. The main gameplay here is arranging puzzle pieces on tracks so they fit into an outline, and doing so in the correct order because pieces can't proceed to some spaces if they bump into or snag another piece along the way. The puzzles involve applying transformations such as rotation, mirroring, and scaling to make the shapes complete. Unlike other games from the bundle, this one contains a simple story. After beating a puzzle you are shown an illustration. It follows this grey figure as they go from place to place and are followed by an orange figure. There's no words and it's pretty abstract which makes it hard to really pin down a plot, but the puzzles are really the main focus anyway.

Focused Playing Games:

Arkanoid DS - Nintendo DS
I was able to complete all 28 zones of the main campaign this week, which unlocked a finale campaign, which is shorter than the main one. The 9 zones here are labeled with greek letters, from alpha to iota. You still play seven zones in the finale campaign, with a choice between three zones for the last 5 rounds. All paths here end with a boss fight. All of them are against these big robots in different colors, which are shaped like the alien character you play as, but have the face of DOH. DOH is the antagonist from earlier arkanoid games in arcades and on NES. He's a red Moai stone head in wireframe. Each choice of the final zone gives a slightly different ending, only changing the story text to say what happens after the robots are destroyed. I'm going to complete all of the Quest stages before I mark this game as complete. A lot of the quest stages are pretty challenging, but they're still fun.

Touhou 6: Embodiment of Scarlet Devil - PC Direct Download
After beating Touhou 5 this summer, I'm finally starting the sixth game, and the first windows Touhou Project game. The new attack patterns are always fun to see, and I like the spell cards introduced here over the boss fights on the PC-98 games. The spell cards show you how many phases the boss has left, and are timed so you can get a bonus if you defeat the boss phase fast enough. I've gotten to stage four, fighting against Patchouli Knowledge with Reimu on Normal. I'm planning to do the same thing I did for the fifth game and try to clear normal with all characters and their shot types, as well as attempting the extra stage.

You are really courageous to try to beat Arkanoid DS, I found incredibly hard! I persevered, but wow, what a journey of hardship.

Week of November 27th - December 3rd
New Games Added:
Guilty Gear X2 #Reload - Steam
Dead Estate Classic - itch.io
Hot Pot Panic - itch.io
◫ - itch.io
10mg: SNAAAK - itch.io
A Dance of Fire and Ice - itch.io
We Become What We Behold - Browser

Additional Notes:
The twelve days of itch-mas event is happening on HLTB! If you don't know what it is, over the last month users on HLTB shared 3 free itch.io games each to a thread. Last week there was a poll to vote for which games of the 39 suggested you are interested in, and the winners are revealed each day in December. There are some ties in the votes, so there's fifteen itch.io games winning the event. Expect a bunch of itch.io games on my blog this month, from the site event, as well as some picked up from the large itch.io charity bundles. Also, I ordered a copy of Zero Time Dilemma on 3DS! I'm excited to play the final game in the Zero Escape Trilogy. I'm glad that I have practically nothing spoiled for me about this game. All I know is that it has plot twists somehow more shocking than Virtue's Last Reward, and that Junpei, Akane, and Phi are in the main cast. One last thing, I put Ynglet on my replay list because there was an adding a dozen bonus levels. It's a pretty big addition to a 2-3 hour long game, so I'm gonna play it again with the bonus material tacked on the end.

Completed Games:

Assemble with Care - Steam
This narrative puzzle game comes from the creators of the Monument Valley games. Assemble with Care is about a repairwoman named Maria who visits a small town on vacation but ends up fixing lots of things for them while she's there. The game's puzzles are pretty fun, you loosen screws and remove panels of objects, replacing the batteries or motors to fix them, then putting it all together again. This gameplay loop is pretty fun, and the variety of objects you're tasked with fixing make for creative puzzles. Between puzzles you get short story segments where Maria talks with people in town and helps repair their relationships as well. The game is short but sweet, having 12 main levels and an epilogue level.

Hook 2 - Steam | PUSH - Steam | Art of Gravity - Steam
These are the remaining three titles from the "Relaxing Puzzle Box" bundle I bought last week. What I could say about each of them broadly overlaps so I'm bunching them together here as one entry. The same progression applies to these three games like I mentioned before about OXXO and Zenge. You are introduced to a puzzle concept, then it is expanded upon with different mechanics. The puzzles are well designed to teach you the mechanics as they are introduced. Art of Gravity is about launching balls to break all the blocks on screen. You're only given a few balls to work with, and it is satisfying to set off chain reactions. I think that PUSH was the game in this collection that took the longest for me to 'get' the puzzle mechanics. You need to push all the buttons on screen, but the order you press them in depends on the image displayed on the button. I'd bought Hook before, and I was pretty surprised by Hook 2. The first game had you reeling in a number of hooks in a specific order so that none of them got caught or snagged. I hadn't looked at the individual store page for Hook 2, as I bought it from the "Relaxing Puzzle Box" bundle's page. I was expecting it to be just like the original but with different puzzles. For the first 10 levels, that was the case, then it throws a curveball and gives you a seemingly impossible level 11. Clicking and dragging the screen reveals the puzzle is in 3D, as are all following puzzles. This was a fun surprise, and the execution of this reveal was really cool. I definitely recommend trying the games in this bundle, the puzzles are really good and are satisfying to solve.

Arkanoid DS - Nintendo DS
I wrapped up the last of the quest mode stages, which was all the game's content aside from versus multiplayer. I found that the higher value quest mode stages did not necessarily correlate with a higher difficulty. For any given stage no matter the value, I could take 30 seconds to beat it first try or spend 15-20 again and again in order to beat it. Overall, Arkanoid DS offers around 180 stages, and the very stylish soundtrack doesn't make repeating stages feel like a chore. One thing I'm surprised that I didn't bring up earlier is how this game had been originally packaged with a special peripheral. While I don't have one, it was a rotating paddle controller that plugged into the GBA slot of the earlier DS models. It's compatible with some of Taito's DS titles like Arkanoid DS, Space Invaders Extreme, and Puzzle Bobble. I found using a stylus for Arkanoid DS was a lot more enjoyable than using the D-pad, but I wonder how well the paddle controller would have played.

Dead Estate Classic - itch.io
The first game of itch-mas. I had a lot of fun with this rouge-like game's progression. I probably would have had more fun with it given I'd had a mouse instead of my laptop's touchpad, but I still enjoyed it. I liked the variety of enemy and boss encounters. The 'classic' in the title means it is the original version of a larger steam release. I may try the full game another time seeing how I enjoyed this one.

Hot Pot Panic - itch.io
The second game of itch-mas. This is a short 15 minute experience, the perfect kind of game for this event. You have two tasks in Hot Pot Panic, eating enough of your food to be full, and to keep up a conversation with the friend across from you. I found this concept fun, juggling your attention between your friend's dialogue so you can give a matching response, and your food so that it does not burn on the hot pot.

Transiruby - Steam
This is the newest game from one of my favorite developers, Skipmore. He previously made the Fairune games, KAMIKO, and also recently, Picontier. Transiruby is a metroidvania game with a lot of fun mechanics. The protagonist Siruby is equipped with a sword as well as a gun that she can use to freeze enemies in place. Frozen enemies can be used as platforms to reach higher areas. There's a huge area to explore, split into four zones, and you'll be visiting each zone a couple times during the game. There are a few creative puzzles to solve along the way too. I especially liked the shoot-em-up sections in the fourth area, where you swap between flying and moving normally on the fly when passing through a barrier. Each of the game's boss fights are well made, and I liked the music as well, especially the theme that plays in area 4. The occasional dialogue between characters is cool, which have a good sense of humor as well. I thought the bit where Siruby cuts off Ukanomitama by just covering up her text box with her own was pretty funny.

◫ - itch.io
The third game of itch-mas. Optimization fail! Your title is unsearchable! In all seriousness this game is fun, revealing and hiding blocks in this specific way is a neat mechanic, and it didn't carry on too long, only being a few minutes to complete.

10mg: SNAAAK - itch.io
Not a part of the event, but I decided to play another short itch.io game that was in my library. You play as a snake, as in the one from the really basic 'snake' game. However, you're exploring a big facility instead of trying to get a high score inside a little box. There's not too much here in terms of gameplay, but what's there is a really cool concept. You don't die upon hitting a wall or your own tail, but are a bit more malleable, being able to slip through yourself if you get into a loop. When being attacked by enemies, your tail shrinks, and will grow back once you are out of danger. I think this health concept is pretty cool, where your body is practically the health bar visual, though most encounters with these turret enemies felt like tests of agility to run by then anything else.

We Become What We Behold - Browser
The fourth game of itch-mas. This is 5-minute-long game that I'd actually played before around when it came out in 2016. It's a social commentary about mass media that does a really good job at portraying its message.

Focused Playing Games:

Touhou 6: The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil - PC Direct Download
I've gotten a bit further in this game, managing to complete Patchouli's boss fight and a little bit into stage 5. I keep screwing up during Meiling's boss fight, and during the second half of stage 4. I'm probably going to practice stages 4 and 5 individually before doing more arcade mode runs.

Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Nintendo 3DS
It's been a bit since I've played a Professor Layton game, so it's nice to get into one again. I've played the first 5 main Layton games, still missing Azran Legacy. This summer I just finished Spirit of Justice, so it'll be exciting to see what the crossover has in store. Knowing the plot twists Professor Layton is known for, as well as the comparatively less shocking turnabouts from Ace Attorney, I'm excited to see how the plot continues. Right now I'm near the beginning of the game, after both pairs have been sent to Labyrinthia, and Phoenix Wright is being called to court (likely to defend Espella).

A Dance of Fire and Ice - itch.io
This is a rhythm game that I'm having a lot of fun with. The premise of rotating circles and the timing between notes being reflected in the angle of the track is really smart. I've already sunk a few hours into it this week, and it is a lot of fun. I'm partway through stage 10, past the checkpoint at 34%, and consistently getting to around 55%, my highest being 73%.

Knowing the plot twists Professor Layton is known for

Heh, that's for sure. Enjoy your time with it!

I'm glad you're enjoying the itchmas event. It's such a fun way to try out those little often more experimental things.

Week of December 4th-10th
New Games Added:
The Year After - itch.io
Sokpop S10: Pocket Watch - Steam
Zero Time Dilemma - Nintendo 3DS
Sisão - Browser
I accidently insulted a witch and now all my clothes are sentient and they hate me! - itch.io
Sokpop S07: sok-worlds - Steam
Super Monkey Ball Touch & Roll - Nintendo DS
Nanostray - Nintendo DS
Null - itch.io
Anonymous Notes: Chapter 1 ~ From the Abyss - DSiWare
Anonymous Notes: Chapter 2 ~ From the Abyss - DSiWare
Anonymous Notes: Chapter 3 ~ From the Abyss - DSiWare
Anonymous Notes: Chapter 4 ~ From the Abyss - DSiWare
Blayzbloo: Super Meele Brawlers Battle Royale - DSiWare
Pro Jumper! Guilty Gear Tangent!? - DSiWare
Super Mario Land - Nintendo 3DS (Virtual Console - Game Boy)
Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins - Nintendo 3DS (Virtual Console - Game Boy)
There She Goes, Wriggle Nightbug! - itch.io
Kuro - itch.io

Additional Notes:
The seventh and eighth games of itch-mas wouldn't run on my laptop, so I'll get back to them when I'm at my desktop PC.

Completed Games:

The Year After - itch.io
The fifth game of itch-mas. This is a short Game Boy style narrative game. It's a simplistic story, but it is interesting the family live out their lives as the seasons go by. I liked the part near the end where you play as the parent that lived (in my case the mother) and see how the other path would have looked, but going backwards.

Sisão - Browser
The sixth game of itch-mas. This short platformer has you trying to get the player character and their shadow to the end flag at the same time. It takes clever maneuvering to pull this off in each level, though I think I may have gotten through some of the later stages quickly through dumb luck.

A Dance of Fire and Ice - itch.io
Again from last week, this is a really fun rhythm game. I love how creative the concept is and how much can be done by just arranging different angles of the track. It took me about 725 attempts to beat the twelfth world, but it was super satisfying to reach the end.

I accidently insulted a witch and now all my clothes are sentient and they hate me! - itch.io
The ninth game of itch-mas. This is a Pokémon-like game where your protagonist has to talk to their clothes to calm them down. It's a cute little story about gender dysphoria and more broadly, social anxiety about how we are perceived by the world. I like how each of the items of clothing has their own personality that roughly correlates to the item.

Null - itch.io
The tenth game of itch-mas. Sorry to the person who nominated Null, but I didn't have fun with this game at all. Going in, I was like, "Heh, it's a death-game where the mastermind is named Zero, where have I heard that before…" because I'd started playing Zero Time Dilemma this week. Upon actually playing Null, I found it to be not good in the slightest. The plot is nonsensical or amateurish at times and is otherwise stuffed with lame anime tropes. There are numerous spelling/grammar errors that distract from the story. Many of the assets used don't even line up with what is being told, which just makes it even more confusing. At one point the protagonist comes across the severed head of the character Cécélia. However, the graphic used for the severed head has long brown hair, while all of Cécélia's previous talk sprites had shorter green hair. I didn't even register that it was supposed to be her until it said her name a few dialogue boxes later. The ending of the game is stupid and is really unsatisfying. Near the start, you are told that Null ties into a larger set of games, but is self-contained and you shouldn't worry about missing anything if you haven't played the author's previous games. Though, in the ending it's revealed that Cécélia is not from this dimension and jumped from one of the previous games so she could "see" the player again, breaking the fourth wall similarly to Monika from DDLC. Along with the sudden reveal of the high council and everyone being from war torn planets that are trying to sway this council by participating in the killing game, I found the game really lame to trudge through. I'd say that the only enjoyment I got out of Null was seeing the characters say "among us" a bunch of times.

There She Goes, Wriggle Nightbug! - itch.io
This is a short Touhou Project game-jam platformer. You play as Wriggle Nightbug (my favorite Touhou character) with gameplay that feels similar to the Fancy Pants Adventures flash games. The mechanics in the game made it fun to run around for collectables and I really enjoyed the boss fight against Alice, which was creative in having you run up the walls in phase two to attack her. A funny part is at the end where you are up against Cirno for a final boss fight, but you can attack her once, which makes her explode with a cheesy explosion gif and her boss theme abruptly cuts out.

G.G Series: WONDERLAND - DSiWare
The G.G Series is a collection of small DSiWare games that span a whole lot of genres, and generally go for two or five dollars a piece. I chose this one to play because it's a bullet hell game, but I'm wondering if any of the series' other offerings are worth checking out. G.G Series: WONDERLAND is a shoot em' up themed around Alice in Wonderland. The bosses are predictably characters like the Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts, along with a Cheshire Cat-girl. There are only three stages that loop, giving you an increased difficulty each time it repeats. It goes on infinitely for a high score, so I played through stage six. You have two shot types that you can use using the B and Y buttons, a strong straightforward shot, or a weaker spread shot, along with a bomb that destroys enemy bullets and gives you an opening for attack.

Kid Tripp - Nintendo 3DS
This game is the predecessor to another 3DS game that I've played, Miles & Kilo. Kid Tripp follows much of the same formula, being an auto running platformer. It's a bit shorter than Miles & Kilo was, but maintains many of the mechanics that made that game fun.

The Textorcist: The Story of Ray Bibba - Steam
This game has a really interesting premise, and pulls it off very well. It is a bullet hell game where you need to dodge enemy attacks with the arrow keys while also typing out phrases on the keyboard to deal damage. It's a lot of fun dividing your attention between both tasks. There's also a bit of risk/reward where you can move your right hand off of the arrow keys to type faster with two hands if you're confident that there's a good opening where you can stop for a moment and not get hit. The twelve or so bosses have a fun variety of bullet patterns as well as some gimmicks to trip you up like turning the words upside down or inserting numbers into the phrase. The game's writing is good and has a solid sense of humor as well. Especially with the last three bosses, the game proves pretty challenging, and is overall a lot of fun.

Kuro - itch.io
The eleventh game of itch-mas. It is a short Horror PSX game, with fixed camera angles like the earlier Resident Evil games. There are a few scares throughout the 20 minute adventure, and the story is interesting.

Focused Playing Games:

Zero Time Dilemma - Nintendo 3DS
A month and a half or so after finishing Virtue's Last Reward, I finally got myself a copy of Zero Time Dilemma. So far, I'm seven hours in and I'm really enjoying it. The puzzles are great as always, and I'm liking the story I've seen so far. The return of the flowchart is nice, and the ability to select from a lot of scenes a little after the start is cool. I've reached two endings so far, the one where you guess the coin being heads or tails correctly at the beginning and Zero just lets you go, which was pretty funny. The other one I found was where you shoot Eric with the crossbow and you discover that Mira is the heart-stealing serial killer. Before this ending you get a choice to type the name of who you want to shoot. Before selecting Eric I tried a couple of other names. "Akane" returns that you cannot access the C-Ward, and others like "Sigma" or "Carlos" says that you can't shoot someone who is already dead. "Zero" can't be shot because you don't know their identity. I tried other names from the series like "Clover", "Quark", "Dio", and "Santa" but they just returned an ERROR message. Most interestingly, typing "Q" tells you that it will only accept Q's real name, which is intriguing. Also, in the flowchart, the choice for who to shoot has four nodes branching off of it. I know that one is for Eric, and I can assume that the second and third are for shooting Mira, and having Q shoot themselves after you uncover their true name. There's no fourth person in the room though, is there? This one is really interesting, I'm sure it'll tie into a revelation later in the game. The cutscenes are kind of janky, and I honestly would have preferred the same style as the visual novel sections in Virtue's Last Reward, but they're alright and the bit of jank doesn't distract from the story. I'm excited to see what happens next, as I think I'm only a little under halfway through the story.

Gabrielle's Ghostly Groove 3D - Nintendo 3DS
This is a little rhythm game for 3DS, controlled by tapping and sliding across the touchscreen in accordance with the music/visual cues. Each song is sandwiched between short story segments with these silly Halloween characters. I found that the first few songs were awkwardly short, only being 30 seconds long or so, but that isn't the case for the rest of them, which is nice. I'm gonna try and beat all the songs with an A ranking, and see how I do on the harder difficulties.

The Textorcist: The Village DLC - Steam
This is a bonus DLC story for The Textorcist, which I finished this week. It's much of the same that I enjoyed from the main game, great boss fights and humor writing. However, I'm encountering a constant game crash during the second boss fight, where when the boss is about to start attacking during their third phase the game crashes. I'm not sure if this is due to my laptop, or a general bug with the game, but I'll have to come back to this DLC at a later time.

Update: Putting this blog on a bit of a hiatus. I don't think I'll be able to keep up with weekly entries of every game I play, so I'm planning to scale back and talk about highlights of each month starting at the end of January 2023.