I nominate Another Crab's Treasure

I'm bouncing off it after a bit less than an hour. The gameplay isn't doing it for me, and I find the combination of 2D mild stealth and puzzle platformer a bit boring. For me the art style also somewhat limits how much I can emphasize with the characters. Animations are fairly limited in the small story segments so far. The dog's extremely cute though. Also love that the game is teaching you about WW1 with facts and real footage in the form of photos from the war. The soundtrack is somber and fitting, though already getting repetitive.

Certainly an interesting game. I reckon I'll drop it, but maybe revisit it at a future time when I'm more interested in a slow burning narrative puzzle platformer (not often the case).

I nominate Cocoon. For April Fools I nominate Someone Stole MY LUNCH!

Finished it now, though I ended up looking up a bit over half the names of characters in order to be able to see the last chapter.

I probably liked the game least out of everyone participating and commenting on here, but I absolutely acknowledge that it's mostly due to me not liking puzzle games in general. I had a grand time slowly exploring each chapter of the story and anticipating what happened, but once that was done and it came down to slowly figuring out every crew members names and fates in order to unlock the last piece of the story, it got really tedious for me, and started to feel like work. At that point I was very tempted to drop the game actually, and rather felt like playing something else that's more enjoyable.

After having looked up the remaining unsolved crew members on the wiki, I'm glad I didn't spend ages trying to figure them out myself. Some of them were very obtuse. If you're someone who enjoys that kind of thing though, I can absolutely see how this game could be near perfect.

For me, I really wish there was a hint system, or at the very least a way to quickly jump into a fate straight from the book, without having to leg it to the location on the ship first. That more than anything felt like the game wasn't appreciating my time as a player.

I really enjoyed the story in this one though, with the way it was being told so disjointedly. Really built anticipation and made me want to dig into it and learn what took place.

As mentioned before, loved the sound design though. The recording quality was really nice, and I loved the OST, ambient sounds and the little jingle when you correctly figure out 3 fates. Was also very happy with the voice acting.

I'll give the game an 8/10 trying to be objective, though for personal enjoyment it would be more of a 7/10.

Right. I can't figure anything out anymore, and I still have half the fates left unsolved. Agreed that it would be very convenient to be able to jump straight into some fates without going to their locations. I'll give it another go, but otherwise will probably leave it be and call it finished.

Great game. Just "finished" it with the bad ending. The whole bargain chapter was missing, so I figured I'd leave the ship, get that sorted, and then come back later, but nope, end of the game. Going to rewind now and figure out more fates. Surprised I'm supposed to figure the rest out with the limited information I have up to this point, but I'll keep at it.

Yeah okay this game is pretty cool, what a fun way to tell a story. By now I've correctly figured out 6 fates, and am just about to go below the gun deck. Lots of faces so far that apparently should be identifiable by using deduction, but so far I don't see how I could guess those with a 3 triangle difficulty rating I've come across. Regardless, I'll take the games advise and revisit them later.

This game is fairly out of my comfort zone as well, seeing as I usually detest puzzle games and quickly get fed up/bored if they present too much of a challenge (Baba Is You really put me off). We'll see how I get along with it the further I get into the game, but I'm not one to shy away from googling for hints if I get stuck.

I really like how snappy the UI is, once you get used to how to navigate the book properly. You can quickly jump in and out of the book, and navigate to where you need to go using bookmarks, and I love that you can zoom onto a person while examining a scene and get the book to open directly to their face in the drawing.

Considering I'm the polar opposite of a completionist and usually stick to Main Story or Main + Extra for my playthroughs, I'll probably not try to identify 100% of the fates, but rather play the game to it's conclusion and leave it at that, though at the moment I am unusually tempted to learn everything the story has to offer, be it with or without googling for hints.

Another thing no one mentioned is the audio design. While there's not too much going on, there's a lot of quality and very clean sound here. This game sounds absolutely fantastic with good headphones and it makes it a joy to play. I'm playing it on my Steam Deck, and it feels perfect on there.

What color palette are you guys playing with? I tried each of the options once, and stuck with LCD. Presents the clearest image for me.

Went into it completely blind, and it's not what I expected. Didn't think I'd be piecing together crimes in this game. I'm less than half an hour into the game, so I'll see where the next hour or two take it, but so far I'm not into it.

I nominate Pokémon FireRed - Rocket Edition.

Looks like a really cool high quality romhack where you play as a team rocket member.

I'll give it a go. I last played it when it came out, and was disappointed that it wasn't the Final Fantasy I grew up on and loved, and disliked the combat system. We'll see how it goes this time!

I nominate Against the Storm

Bit late to the party, but here's what I have finished so far:

❌ 01. A new game (released within the past year)
❌ 02. An old game (released 10+ years ago) -
✅ 03. A really old game (released 20+ years ago) - Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow
❌ 04. An ancient game (released 30+ years ago)
❌ 05. A time sink (50+ hours)
❌ 06. A quick completion (less than an hour)
❌ 07. A game you got for free
❌ 08. A game you've been wishing and waiting for
❌ 09-1. A remake or remaster of a game
❌ 09-2. A game that wasn't translated into your language until some time after its initial release
❌ 10. A game with 6+ endings
❌ 11. A collection of games
❌ 12. A game recommended to you by someone else
❌ 13. A game whose title could describe your life
❌ 14-1. A game with an alliterative title
❌ 14-2. A game whose title contains the name of a colour
❌ 14-3. A game whose title starts with a number
❌ 15. A game that heavily focuses on flight
❌ 16. A game from a genre you don't usually play
❌ 17. A game that is themed around dogs or cats
❌ 18-1. A game that features multiple genres, or is a mashup of different genres
❌ 18-2. A visual novel or text-based game
❌ 19. A game where you play as an antihero or a villain
❌ 20-1. A game set in a historical time period
❌ 20-2. A game set in the far future
❌ 21. A game with a female protagonist
✅ 22. A game without any humans - Pikmin 4
❌ 23. A game where you play as a robot or an alien
❌ 24. An arcade-style high score game
❌ 25-1. A game set in a world you would like living in
❌ 25-2. A game whose protagonist you would want to be friends with
❌ 26. A game where you play as a bug or an aquatic creature
❌ 27. A game that was adapted from another medium (book, movie, etc.) or a game that has been adapted into another medium
❌ 28. A game you watched someone else play first (partially or in full)
❌ 29. Another person’s favourite game
❌ 30. A game with a diverse cast
❌ 31. A cornerstone to gaming culture
❌ 32. A game that starts with the same first letter as in your username (if your username doesn’t contain letters, pick a random letter)
❌ 33-1. A “threequel” (third part of a series) - {Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory}
❌ 33-2. A spin-off game
❌ 34. A bright and cheerful game
❌ 35. A game containing a real or fictional religion
❌ 36. A game that heavily features either fire or ice
❌ 37. A game that heavily features money, gold, or economics
❌ 38. A game with a subtitle
✅ 39. A game that surprised you - Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
❌ 40. A post-apocalyptic game
❌ 41. A game with a short title (4 letters or less)
❌ 42. A game that had a red retirement rating on HLTB when you started playing it (10% or higher)
❌ 43. A game that one of your favourite artists worked on (artist, developer, musician, voice actor/actress, etc.)
❌ 44-1. A game you previously retired or put on hold
❌ 44-2. A game that you have beaten before and are replaying
❌ 45. A game that is on someone else’s HLTB 2024 Gaming Challenge List
❌ 46-1. A studio's very first game
❌ 46-2. A studio's most recent game (at the time when you started playing the game)
❌ 47. A game that had its HLTB times on a purple/red/grey background at the time you started playing it (colour indicates the amount of submitted playtimes, red = low amount, grey = zero)
❌ 48. A game that has been a HLTB Game of the Month
❌ 49. A game listed on the HLTB stats page, or the stats page filtered for a single platform
❌ 50. A game chosen by the HLTB randomizer

❌✅

I nominate Kaze and the Wild Masks

I love my Steam Deck. It became my favourite gaming device of all time since I got it a bit over 12 months ago, and by far my most used gaming platform in 2023. It can play almost my whole PC game library, as well as most emulators, and even a lot of less demanding Switch games. It's very comfy to hold in your hands, even for longer play sessions, and the hardware as well as SteamOS are very nice.

The only caveats is that it requires a bit of tinkering and messing about to get some non-steam games running, and it can thus take a bit of setup to run some games. Everything imaginable has tutorials out there though that are pretty straightforward to follow, but unless you only want to restrict yourself to games on Steam, there's a tiny bit of a learning curve involved.
It also really struggles in new AAA games, think pretty current gen exclusive games. Alan Wake 2 technically runs, but it's a smudgy looking mess running at sub-30fps. Same for games like Returnal.

I absolutely love mine, and ended up getting rid of my old gaming PC. I now just use a combination of a Laptop + USB-C hub for general computer use, and when I want to game at the desk, I just plug my Deck into the same hub I use for my Laptop, and it's a very comfy, low energy consumption and portable way to enjoy my games. I also picked up a cheap usb-c hub and a cheap stand to dock the Deck to my TV if I want to play games on the sofa, without having to unplug and move my desk hub.

Soundmarine was a cute little audiovisual experience. Enjoyed my three minutes with it, but nothing special ultimately. 6/10
Mapfiend I don't even know, I need way more context. Was too vague for me. Weird game. Didn't do anything for me. 5/10

Really surprised this didn't get picked as GOTM earlier..

I would highly recommend the Black Mesa version. In my opinion it's the definitive way to play this classic.

I prefer the original over Black Mesa. Played Black Mesa earlier this year and it's been buggy. Performance dipped hard for no reason on a powerful PC in one of the sections of the game the one outdoor, with the rocket, and I had a gamebreaking bug in Xen that required me to restart a stage with a console command, which made me lose all my weapons. Which I then had to cheat back sigh. The expanded Xen version that wasn't in the original also feels worse than the rest of the game.

That aside, Half-Life is a fantastic game, I've played it many times over the years since I was young. I'm excited for more people to get into it and play it for the first time. Considering the anniversary update came out recently, I'll give it another play as well sometimes this month. Maybe over Christmas!

Here goes:

UNDER A STAR CALLED SUN - [HLTB] [Itch]

Descent - [HLTB] [Itch]

iro - [HLTB] [Itch]

Alright, finished it! The game ended quicker than I thought, and I ended up finishing my neutral playthrough in just under 6 hours. Had a really good time with the game overall. Thought it was quite innovative in the way it tackled morality and the combat system. It was also more challenging than I had expected, and I consistently underestimated how many healing items I need to keep in my inventory. Undyne and Mettaton kicked my butt a few times. The characters were well written and quite charming for the most part.

I love that there are so many different branching dialogue trees in this game as well depending on the actions you take, though I don't think I'll have another go myself, but will rather watch the alternate routes on YouTube. Also the last fight against Flowey was really cool. What a trip!

Originally Posted by: ThomasE

Am I the only one that experienced a few glitches?

I had a couple of bugs on the Switch version, though not the same as you! For me, sometimes the rows and columns bugged out where a line would be done, but all the numbers still show up black. Had to untick and tick a box again to make sure the game marked the row/column as complete.

Horror games eh? I nominate Dredge.

Yeah I'm enjoying it as well. I did get a bit burned out by the Picross puzzles halfway through Case 3, and started cheesing some of them. There's two ways I discovered to do it. One is to just spam the helper function that fills in 5 fields, the other is to put the game on easy and just hold down the mark button to mark everything. Takes less than 20 seconds to cheese a 15x15 that way. It will automatically mark any fields that shouldn't be marked as crosses.

Anyway, the music gets ultra repetitive while solving Picross puzzles, and there's just too many in a row in the last two cases, and they take too long once they become 15x15s, which really hurts the pacing between puzzles and story.

I'm really enjoying the story/detective side of things. SCOUTs little puns are funny, and the game makes me giggle a lot. It's just a wholesome affair, even if the writing is a bit silly with regards to the main character jumping to conclusions too quickly. I'm also curious to see how the overarching plot will pan out, although I imagine it's fairly predictable. But I don't mind, it's a fun time solving crimes with SCOUT, Honor and Detective Cross.

I'm three hours in and just finished the first case. It's really good! The humour hits the spot for me, and I love the characters. SCOUT is soooo cute. It's a very lighthearted game. The OST is lovely as well, love solving Puzzles with chill music and SCOUT next to the grid. Very curious to see where the story is going to go, as there was clearly something afoot at the end of the first case.

At first I was worried that it was going to be too easy, and it would stay on a 5x5 or even a 10x10 grid too long, but it's actually quite varied. I've done a bunch of 15x15s so far on normal difficulty, and while I haven't encountered a puzzle where I got stuck yet, I'm glad it's not incredibly easy. I'm hoping the difficulty will continue to increase as well.

I'm very glad it has a function where it can show you your mistakes though, because that can be an enormous mess once you're close to finishing a picross, but mistakes crept in and nothing makes sense anymore.

The only thing that concerns me is whether or not it can keep the momentum going over 20+ hours, as that seems to be quite excessive. I might get bored once it hits the 8-10 hour mark, but we'll see.

I had never heard of this game before it was nominated, so I'm happy to get a chance to play it now.

Blasphemous II comes out tomorrow, so I'm going with that.