I'm coming to the end of a couple of weeks away, so hoping to get stuck into some newer stuff when I get back. Otherwise, still a lot of Bombe and MC Eternal.

Bombe continues to impress. Though it's mostly devolved to "Watch the rules solve puzzles for you" and "Obtuse edge case blocks you." The tools exist for refining your rules and removing superfluous overspecific edge-cases from the set, but they are a bit clumsy and don't really reapply them to old puzzles when they should.

I played most of Chasing Static, which is a short (2 hours or so) first person horror game set in some sort of haunted zone with some light adventure/puzzle gaming. The story is fleshed out via "flashbacks" in a stop-motion style, similar to a slightly animated Obra Dinn. I've been interested in this game since release, But it was drawn to my attention again recently when I noticed it was extremely low on the Hardcore Gaming 101 Top 47k Games List for what seemed like a competent game. As for the game itself, it's fairly solid so far and creates a good atmosphere without annoying jumpscares. It's at it's most effective in the opening half hour, where the protagonist stops at a diner and interacts with a waitress. After that it becomes a bit fetch-questy. Although redundant solution items dispersed throughout the main areas of the game make it less linear and monotonous then such a game usually is. Unfortunately I've become stuck missing a key item in my game, and it could be literally anywhere. Without an effective guide (I can't find any outside the "Part 56 of 78" Youtube variety) I've hit a brick wall.

The highlight this week for me has been In Stars and Time, a JRPG with a timeloop theme. I started playing this at the start of the week and have been playing an hour or two every night since, I'm about 12 hours in (including some AFK time). The game is a fairly standard RPG plot, you (Siffrin) and your crew are on a quest to defeat an evil King who has frozen time in his home castle and threatens to end the world. There's a relatively straightforward, but fun, battle system with notable novelties of Rock-Paper-Scissors replacing elemental systems, and an emphasis of gifting turns to others. The main point of the game is the timeloop, essentially everytime Sifffrin dies, the game loops (either back to the start, or later, any previous save point). Sometimes puzzles require this, other times its a necessity due to being stuck in a dead end, other times it's an accident/comic set up. The game does a good job of making this interesting, altering scenes with your new knowledge and allowing you to quickly skip previously viewed scenes. I have a few minor quibbles, there are a couple of bugs with the loop logic, requiring you to reloop a few unnecessary times for some sidequests. The first run through is a tad verbose, which serves to build an interesting start area you want to return to, but at the time it's a little bit slow and frustrating. Overall though: Excellent, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it ends.

All Games Played

• MC Eternal: Good
• Bombe: GREAT (Notable)
• Chasing Static: OK
• In Stars and Time: GREAT (Notable)

This week I've been busy with work, travel and family commitments. But I've continued to play a lot on the MC Eternal. I worry I'm just doing this out of habit while in a low mood. But I'm still enjoying progressing my in game projects and seeing the work of others

The other large amount of time I spent this week was playing the new additions to Corru.Observer, which are incredible. This seems to be the first large amount of new content outside the REDACTED sections for a while, which brings back a lot of the surreal quality of the early game.

All Games Played

• MC Eternal: Good
• Talented: OK
• Vampire Survivors: GREAT
• Corru Observer: GREAT (Notable)
• Swollen To Bursting Until I am Disappearing on Purpose: Good

This week I played a lot MC Eternal on a friend's server. Minecraft is still a lot of fun in the right circumstances, and this mod (or collection of mods) adds a lot of new interesting things to the game. It's extremely rough around the edges though. It crashes a lot and literally takes 10-15 minutes to load. Some of the custom enemies also just kill you before you can work out what happened, or if anything happened.

I started playing Ugly, a puzzle platformer loosely in the style of Braid. It has fantastic art and a great gimmick themed around swapping with a ghostly clone that moves in opposite directions. The plot seems very good, but it has a nasty tendency to crash after every boss fight (which themselves are spectacular but not enjoyable).

I picked up Sunless Skies. It's an enjoyable take on the gameplay first game in the series, Sunless Seas. Except instead of piloting a ship around a haunted underground sea, you are driving a ship around haunted space. Very good writing, and the trading mechanics are compelling. The collision detection annoys me a bit.

Talented is a "roguelite" game where you attack enemies coming down lanes in the four cardinal directions. The main gimmick is an enormous pseudo-randomized talent tree for each run. It's a textbook example of the worst trends in so called roguelites (compared to the true roguelike.) It's impossible to win in the first run, and then the hyper-glimbus unlocks and then it becomess impossible to lose. The runs themself are fun and there's a decent variety of character powers and enemies, but as said previously many become immediately obsolete. It is in early access though, so I'm hopeful.

Grezzodue 2 is a Doom total conversion from Italy that claims "THE MOST EDGY, ULTRAVIOLENT AND BLASPHEMOUS ALL ITALIAN-FPS EVER IS RETURNED". It looks and plays like a bad late 90s Doom total conversion or early Megaman Romhack where the robot masters are all called "FUCKDICKCRAPMAN". I don't speak enough Italian to know if it's actually offensive or not, but I'm going to assume from the gratuitous nudity and gore that it is. Title theme is a banger, but the game is probably not really suitable for anyone tbh.

Gridroad an early access traffic management game where you build roads to get cars from a source to a destination. Has promise, but it's pretty short so far and the lane drawing rules are needlessly complex. 90% of the puzzle solving is dealing with the very boring and cumbersome traffic light system.

I had high hopes when I started Incarnation, a mouse-driven platformer. Where you start as an immortal floating god blob, but lose a power of your choice from an inverse talent-tree at the end of each level. Neat concept, but the game almost immediately throws mechanics not suitable to the mouse at you, and they've managed to somehow import horrible FPS ladders into a 2d game. There's a glitch where the aiming is slightly off too, which fucks everythong up. Despite the negativity in this paragraph, I'd like to give it another go because the concept is great and there seems to be more there.

Rating System

In my 2024 log I'm experimenting with a weekly game rating system. My experiences with games are cautiously rated on this scale: GREAT -> Good -> OK -> Disappointing -> BAD

Important GREAT or BAD games will be marked as (Notable)

All Games Played

• MC Eternal: Good
• Ugly: Good
• Sunless Skies: Good
• Talented: OK
• Grezzodue 2: OK
• Side Pocket (SNES): Good
• Gridroad: Disappointing
• Incarnation: OK
• My Summer Car: OK