Izzy's 2024 gaming year in review.

[canedaddy]

Did the Vita version come with a lot of tables or was it more of a piecemeal sort of thing with lots of DLC? I'm still kicking myself for not buying ALL the tables packs before they were delisted. I've got most of them, but it was dumb of me for not picking up the rest.

My recollection is it came with four great ones and the rest were DLC, although they must have been pretty cheap because I bought a few.

[isthatallyougot]

#52 Homing (PC) (2020) 1/5 (Playtime 5 to 10 minutes.)



Putting my backlog into a randomizer again, it pulled out a game from my itch.io library called Homing. In this game, you control a pigeon's point of view as the narrator presumably reads the contents of the letter in the bird's grasp as it flies to some unknown destination. There's very little interactivity, other than changing the perspective of the flight. We learn about a breakup between two female lovers and how they had hoped to build their life together with their child Jacob. As the bird completes its flight and makes its delivery, we're given a revelation about what happened to the couple - the surprise twist in this very brief experience. I have nothing bad to say about the emotional content or the visuals, as they were fine low poly in my opinion. The problem is that there is nothing to it other than the brief narration. For me, this hardly qualifies as a game and is more of a mildly interactive art piece. I knew nothing of it going in, but I was hoping to control the pigeon and make deliveries or at least something in terms of interaction. I appreciate the creator's attempt at sharing, and the reveal was a bit poignant, but as a game, it's a 1/5 for me.

[isthatallyougot]

#51 Arise : A Simple Story (PC 2020) 1/5 (2 hours played)



I picked up a game called Arise: A Simple Story in late 2024 that caught my interest, and I fired it up right away - something I rarely ever do. The charms were immediately apparent. A world with gorgeous, if simple, natural vistas in the form of a (seemingly) emotionally-drenched 3D platformer. And on first inspection, I was really encouraged. Things open with a tribe burning a corpse in their tradition of sending a loved one on to their version of the afterlife, and then the scene transitions to an image of an older man in an open snowfield. This was presumably indicating the passage of time, and this journey was going to be a sort of healing trip where some inner peace was realized about one of those inevitable things that is simply outside our control on this often-bumpy road of life. And I was immediately engaged with the method of interaction. The crux of the puzzle platforming centered on the manipulation of the flow of time and how that affects your surrounding world. For example, the melting (or restoring) of ice will change potential platforms. Insects flying about overhead change position, which allows for your (perhaps tiny?) avatar to grapple them and then be carried away to unreachable places. One element that was particularly impressive was when I found myself in a field of gigantic sunflowers, and moving the stick left or right to cause the passage of time changed the angle and position of the sunflowers relative to their greedy search for the life-giving light of our star. In their shifting state, pathways for movement were altered and opened. There was some clever stuff already very early on in the experience, and my hopes of having an emotionally affecting and fun platforming journey were really high.

However, oh boy, however, indeed! Early on in level two, you need to grapple some bees with your grappling hook in order to move and swing forwards onto new platforms in order to progress. But, there's a glitch that prevented me from utilizing the hook more than once. I'd connect to one bee and move time (and the bee) forward and then encounter another to which I had to connect. But when I pushed the button, the clicking sound of the guy grabbing the hook played, but he wouldn't unfurl it and cast it forwards to the new target. This is a bug that has affected a not insignificant amount of players, if even a minority, apparently. And in looking around on both the Steam forums and elsewhere online, I discovered that some people offered some potential solutions. (not the developer, however - they had no answers of their own - just a shrug and “maybe try what that guy did,” lmao. Well done dev.) The most common trick was to push the corresponding keyboard key ("alt" in this case) one time and then use the controller button again (x in this case), and for some that sorted things out. Not for me, however. (or many others) There were also suggestions of changing resolutions and all manner of weird hacks... JUST SO YOU COULD PLAY THE GAME! I eventually discovered that if I went to the main menu and clicked “reload last checkpoint," he would then respawn where I was and would then execute the move a second time. Problem solved. It's an awkward and tedious solution, but at least I could play and enjoy the game if I exercised that bit of patience and forgiveness. Um, well. Towards the end of level 2, still early in the game, I encountered a scenario where I had to jump on springy spider webs that had formed, again through the fun and clever movement of time, in order to reach new platforms. The problem, however, is that the dude just wouldn't jump high enough to get to where he needed to go. So I then read about some more solutions to this issue, and it seems some had success if they killed themselves and then respawned and made *all* the jumps in succession without making a mistake. But when I reached a web near the apparent end of the level, he simply would not elevate to a sufficient height to reach the area for progression. It was here that I realized what I was dealing with. I'm not saying everyone else had my experience, but I installed this on both Windows and Linux and tried a multitude of solutions to a variety of problems very early in the game and was still not able to get results that would simply allow me to progress. And I haven't even covered the fact that the platforming was laggy and unresponsive in addition to being a 3D platformer with a fixed camera, yes, a 3D environment with a *FIXED* camera, ugh! In the end, my experience of this game was of a work that was *both* a technical and mechanical mess of a thing. There was surely the concept of a compelling and interesting world and narrative to explore, but if I can't *PLAY* your game, I certainly can't give it a good rating. And as usual, I feel I was very patient with things, spending 2+ hours trying to get this thing to behave nicely. Who knows how I would have ultimately felt about it? I feel like it would have been a worthwhile game, even with the clunky platforming, had I been able to continue. It might have even been a 3 or 4-star game for me, although such guessing is both pointless and premature. What might have been is, however, not what ultimately *is*, and what Arise *IS*, is a broken game in which I couldn't progress to the end of chapter 2. No matter what your positives, if I cannot experience your potential as *realized* rather than theoretical, I'm left judging things on what I *did* (was able to) experience. And it wasn't much here. In the cosmic and comically mischievous balance of all things, Arise has fallen to the bottom of my rating scale. 1/5.


EDIT: The 1's are done, thankfully. Moving on up!

[canedaddy]

Wow, you have vast reservoirs of patience. Pretty crazy how the devs responded (or failed to respond) to those issues.

[argyle]

Wow, you have vast reservoirs of patience. Pretty crazy how the devs responded (or failed to respond) to those issues.

Seriously, at this stage of my life I would have nope'd out of that one after about 5-10 mins.

EDIT: I did notice that I have Arise on one of my Switch wishlists, so I may have to look up to see if the game is worthwhile and how it runs there.

[isthatallyougot]

Yeah guys, having patience with games is surely a double-edged sword. Sometimes I'm rewarded and sometimes I end up wasting time. Case in point:

#50 Last Word (PC - 2015) 2/5 (6 1/2 hours.)



You know I have loved ranking and reviewing the games I play for a long time, and as I've continued this side hobby, I've come to more fully understand my own likes and dislikes within gaming and just generally have a better sense of my appreciation for various works as I've tried to critique and articulate my interpretations of my experiences. One thing that I have come to understand is that, while there are the unfortunate few games that are truly trash in my estimation, there are some games that are almost worse as overall experiences. I'll explain. Truly awful games don't waste too much of my time. They show me what they are, and I dismiss them from my rotation and quickly forget all about them, having only wasted a minimum of time in most all cases. However, there are some games that really get under my skin in a far more annoying manner than the truly wretched. There are some games that offer just enough to keep me curious and hooked in, and so I keep playing with these glimmers of interest pulling me along. But in some cases, these whispers of “what might be” never amount to anything of real value. I see some potential, and my curiosity is engaged, but it's all a big tease that drags me along with no payoff, and when I experience this, I get really frustrated for wasting a not-insignificant amount of my time on something that ultimately left me unsatisfied.

Enter a game called Last Word, which I pulled randomly from my itch.io backlog on PC. The premise is pretty interesting. You play as a photographer who is a guest at a posh party. Everyone at this gathering is a witty and accomplished conversationalist, and they all love getting the best of others via their sharp and quick tongues. There are a variety of rather interesting characters, snooty and otherwise, to add color to the evening. The point of this party is that the host, Professor Chet Chatters (nice name), is going to reveal a revolutionary invention, an invention that we ultimately come to know as a device that allows the professor to *always* get in the “last word" and therefore win all arguments and manipulate circumstances as he desires. In the course of this evening, you, as Whitty Gawship (another nice name), interact with the other guests and discover a wide variety of topics that you unlock that allows for normal banter and discovery along with the option to engage in conversational “battles,” the primary means of gameplay in this unconventional RPG. These conversational conflicts are pretty interesting. There are a variety of meters and attributes that you must focus on during the dynamic discourse with your opponent. You are ultimately trying to push things in your favor by moving a bar on a meter all the way to your opponent's side for the victory. And there are many ways to impact that flow with the ability to unlock more skills as you progress and level up. It's mostly about managing the type of tone and degree of emphasis for these interactions so that you can gain the upper hand. You can choose from a disruptive, submissive, or aggressive posture, all with various degrees of emphasis on those variables in order to build your tact and power so that you can execute damaging attacks and/or buffer against your opponent's remarks. And it's more complicated than that, but I won't bother going into the fine print. Suffice it to say that this battle system was unique and interesting, and it captured my attention as I played and wanted to learn how to better execute. So the basic premise of the game was quite engaging, and I liked a lot about what it offered.

However, given the opening paragraph, yes, of course, however, given the placement on my yearly countdown, there were some issues that failed to land, issues which ultimately hurt this game quite substantially in my view. In the first place, the actual story was just silly, and it was more of a dumb-silly than a tantalizing and fun type of silly. The professor's invention was this “mouth” that, well, it was just dumb, lol. And all the little details of how and why this thing was made just really never grabbed me. It just fell flat and was hard to enjoy, either from the fantastical standpoint or from the ongoing quality of the dialogue, even if the character archetypes were somewhat interesting. The story was just *there*, and I never really felt a pull from it like I did with the battle mechanics. I was also disappointed that a game that seemed to indicate that it would be so focused on language failed to utilize actual language in the duels. I was hoping for something like ‘Oh...Sir!! The Insult Simulator' which I played and enjoyed several years ago, a game that allows you to pick and choose your absurd phrases. And even though the battle mechanics were interesting in their unique nature, they ultimately amounted to a very complex game of rock-paper-scissors, and I found them more convoluted than elegant or necessary. And besides that, they often weren't very intuitive, and it took a good while and a fair bit of grinding before I felt capable in these contests, and then it was just over. And visually, the whole game takes place in a singular location with very simple RPG-Maker graphics. The simple graphics aren't a problem, but the lack of visual diversity was disappointing. But as stated in the beginning, this game seemed to keep giving me *just* enough of that carrot-on-a-stick vibe that I kept playing until I had finished it after about six and a half hours. *BUT*, it never realized its potential, and when I reached the end, I was left with a feeling of having mostly wasted my time, even if there were elements that were worthwhile, taken in isolation. It maintained just enough promise that it vampired away my time without leaving me with any feeling of satisfaction, and so I'm left with that rotten taste in my mouth of having given / invested without having really received, in the end. (If you've ever had that type of relationship with anyone in your life, you know.) Just a heartless succubus, despite some appearances to the contrary. Ugh, I hate that feeling. My last word is a maddening 2/5.

[canedaddy]

I was also disappointed that a game that seemed to indicate that it would be so focused on language failed to utilize actual language in the duels.

Yeah, that's a big letdown. It would take a lot of work to do that well, but man that would be cool.

[isthatallyougot]

Yeah, that's a big letdown. It would take a lot of work to do that well, but man that would be cool.

Yeah, I'm sure you're right, though, about the enormity of the task if you were going to do things like I was hoping. And even the other game I referenced did it in more of a silly fashion without any real depth or linguistic logic to things. Hey, maybe this is your new career. Get busy!

#49 Marie's Room (PC - 2018) 2/5 (about an hour)



Continuing to browse through my itch.io library in the hopes of making a small dent, I stumbled upon a game called Marie's Room from 2018. (This game is free on Steam also, btw.) It's essentially an exploration of the relationship between two friends and an event from their past in which you explore (via memory) the room of the friend and the drama that unfolded long ago. The “world” you explore consists of only a brief introductory hallway and, as the title would suggest, Marie's room. We come to learn about what happened to Marie via the examination of objects, which prompts her friend and your avatar, Kelsey, to verbalize her thoughts and emotions about the meaning of these things. And as you collect more and more details, Marie's journal on her bed is filled page by page, giving you a more complete picture about her life, their relationship, and what happened. I have no issue with the fundamental design of the game. It's possible to have an interesting experience with such foundations. And visually it was fine, if minimal, within its limited space.

However, the narrative came off very “try-hard” from my perspective. Things felt forced in a way where the developer was determined to *make* you feel and show you how “deep” they could be, rather than allowing for these emotions to come naturally if warranted. I didn't find the story interesting really at all and didn't find the intended profundity, despite the creator's insistence. It was actually pretty tedious and boring to me. Additionally, the game can be completed in an hour or less, as reflected by the fact that there isn't even any option to save. It was one of those games where you just feel kind of bludgeoned by a creator that wants to appear adult without really having the experiences or skills to translate effectively. I'm clearly an outlier, though, judging by the positive reviews. To me it was neither fun nor interesting, despite a rather interesting skeleton shaping the interaction. I guess I'm just an out-of-touch old dude. 2/5

[isthatallyougot]

#48 Wooden Hearts (PC - 2019) 2/5 (39 minutes played.)



Browsing once again into my itch.io backlog seeking to make a dent, I selected a random game to play called Wooden Hearts. You have presumably arrived on some island, judging by the first scene with a rowboat and open water in your view. Not being able to enter the boat, you're forced to go in the other direction. You're carrying a lantern in this wooded area and eventually stumble upon a crumbling building of some kind. Upon investigating, you encounter some creepy otherworldly child and the suggestion (from many scattered posters and flyers) that this place may have been where so many missing children eventually wound up. Upon further digging, you discover a collection of marionettes and a clue that these may have been the fascination of some magician. Somehow, he seems to have learned how to animate them and give them some sort of “life,” presumably via the energy of all the lost children of the world. The mood and atmosphere were pretty good with some nice sounds and a jump scare or two. And the concept was interesting. But the controls were never explained, nor did they accommodate a controller. (And I couldn't be arsed to reconfigure the bindings in this case.) So I fumbled in a spot or two with execution when it came to moving objects. There's also a tiny bit of uninspired platforming. And it is possible to die, at least in one spot. But the game was also overly dark, even with the lantern you were carrying, making it a little awkward to navigate. It served the mood, I suppose, but it was *too* dark in some spots. And the game wasn't too long. I spent less than an hour total to reach the end. It wasn't an awful game, and as mentioned, the premise and atmosphere were pretty engaging, but there wasn't enough to it, as with many of these really small releases. Sometimes these experimental projects / games are really compelling, but often they end up feeling like more of a demo for something that needed to be fleshed out more fully. This one had potential to be a good game but wasn't sufficiently developed to warrant such a judgment, despite its positives. 2/5

[canedaddy]

It's cool that you will fire up something like that and give it a chance. Sounds semi-interesting, but I know I would have bailed when it came to exploring in a too-dark world. Cannot stand that.