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Mewgenics (PC) by jp (Nov 3rd, 2026 at 17:19:24) |
After a bunch of good/easy runs I got into a streak of bad runs...all the cats dying and that sort of thing. Which makes me wonder if this wasn't designed - as in, I got an easy run in the beginning before the (invisible) training wheels came off?
The longer I played though, the more grating the crass humor became. To a point that I'm happier just playing something else now, which is a bit of a shame because there's interesting stuff here and I was enjoying discovering new combos and interactions and such. But, it also feels like the game is a bit grindy in ways I'm not too excited for...I need to "dump" a lot of cats to get more upgrades so, is it really worth it? It doesn't seem like it, so I'm putting this back on the metaphorical shelf...
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Read Only Memories: Neurodiver (NSW) by jp (Nov 3rd, 2026 at 17:16:11) |
Finished this last night and it was... well, less interesting than I had hoped? The interesting parts of the story sort of got lost along the way, and the interesting things about this cyberpunk universe (one on which psychic abilities and gene-manipulation such that people can acquire certain animal traits exist!) were also downplayed to focus on a story that's loosely about memories/reality and...sort of a ghost(?) (as in Ghost in the Shell, not as in scary ghost stories).
Also, the "puzzly" moments - picking which pictures from your inventory to drag into slots on a fuzzy picture that needs solving were...mostly nonsensical to me - as in, I never felt really confident as to why I had to pick certain things and not others. The logic behind the correct solutions was unclear at best...which was annoying. I even looked up a video playthrough for one part - and the person who did the video ran into the same problem with the puzzle I was stymied by. And they did what I did - scoured the other places for something they may have missed before going back and trying combinations until one worked.
At least I did confirm that the order of selection did not matter. A relief that made the trial and error a lot easier to manage. Thankfully.
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Monster Hunter World (PS4) by jp (Oct 30th, 2026 at 13:18:58) |
I'm really digging this so far. It's a lot more involved than I imagined, but also seems a little bit familiar...from playing the mobile f2p game of all things.
I'm only a few missions in, just getting started, but I've been having fun exploring and learning about all the things the game has. Which is a lot! Crafting and cooking and inventory and stuff management. And lots of different weapon types, I've only tried two...but it's also been weird...
1. I started out with a full plate armor set equipped - I think this might have been a promo of some sort? But, it's super good - like, way above level...so I don' really take damage when fighting monsters so I feel like I'm cheesing it. But, this wasn't my choice - I just started like that.
2. From reading reviews over the years and stuff others had said, I sort of had the idea that the spaces in this game were huge, and it took time to track down and hunt a monster...and that it was all really involved.. but so far I feel like the spaces are really small. And tight. I've fought the "big" monsters 3 times - and they're not that big nor that remote...which feels strange. Perhaps I'm just getting the easy-peasy low level "big" monsters that sort of slum it in the starter areas? It's happened to me twice that I'm "tracking" a monster and then it's just there...wandering around and I tart to attack it. It's neat how their animations when they're wounded, and then try to run away...felt bad too.They make different noises (more "I'm dying and in pain" than "amgry roar be scared".
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Read Only Memories: Neurodiver (NSW) by jp (Oct 30th, 2026 at 13:11:04) |
It feels weird to say that I almost bailed on a visual novel because I couldn't solve a puzzle. But it's true!
I don't actually know what happened, but this was a scene where you have to place items from your inventory...and I had three items, did it, got it wrong, tried all the combinations and it still didn't work. Then I spent 20 minutes scouring the environments in case I had missed something, did not find anything new and was about to go "ugh, I'm done". Went back, tried again, and now it worked. What?
I think I might have misunderstood how the interface worked or was supposed to work? Maybe I did it differently the 2nd time? I don't know. We'll see what happens the next time I get to a "puzzle" (I mean, they're not really puzzles, but hey...)
So far I'm intrigued, but I've only played what I assume is the prologue - so, we'll see how much longer I can maintain interest. The problem I sometimes have with games like this where you have to do lots of reading is that, if I'm playing at night in bed, I'll just get sleepy five minutes in. So, it's really hard to make progress.
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Fallout 4 (PS4) by jp (Oct 26th, 2026 at 15:08:51) |
Made it to level 9, did a few more quests and...yeah, I think I'm tired now. Strangely, it feels like there isn't much/enough story for me to continue to want to play, and I got a bit tired of always being under-health? Well, that got a bit better because I "discovered" (figured out) the cooking part of the game - I was finally able to put all these animal/critter parts and learned that lots of the stuff you cook then gets rid of the rads (all the food items I had healed, but also added rads - and I didn't have a way to mitigate that, so it seemed like a negative downward spiral). The no-rads healing food was really a game changer in that way, so that was a big improvement.
Oh, every now and then there's a weird storm - and it was a super cool experience - it sounds and looks incredible and I was genuinely worried...rads going up, lightning noises and stuff. Great ambience!
Maybe I should have gotten to the city I was supposed to visit for the story...but Ilooked at the shelf of over games to play and though..meh.
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GameLog hopes to be a site where gamers such as yourself keep track of the games that
they are currently playing. A GameLog is basically a record of a game you started playing. If it's open,
you still consider yourself to be playing the game. If it's closed, you finished playing the game. (it doesn't matter
if you got bored, frustrated,etc.) You can also attach short comments to each of your games or even maintain a diary (with more detailed entries)
for that game. Call it a weblog of game playing activity if you will.
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2323 registered gamers and 3395 games. 7935 GameLogs with 13453 journal entries. 5109 games are currently being played.
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Nobody Saves the World (PC) by dkirschner |
| This is so creative, charming, and fun. Very cool take on ARPGs. ---------- Fun, but grindy. |
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most recent entry: Monday 24 January, 2022
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This popped up on Game Pass last week and when I looked it up on a whim, saw that it is a new game from Drinkbox Studios, who developed the quirky Guacamelee! games, which I love. This is an action-RPG with a similarly colorful art style and silly humor. It's fun and has an engaging gameplay loop with quests, dungeons, and unlocks, but is very grindy by design!
In Nobody Saves the World, you play as Nobody, a "naked baby salamander" (as an early character describes you) with a wand that gives him the power to change forms. Your goal is to defeat the Calamity, which is infecting people and taking over the land with a gross fungus. You do this by grinding quests through dungeons for 15 or 20 hours to level up your forms and become a badass.
The forms are the magic design element and are really creative and fun to play with. You start off as Nobody and once you get the wand, you can turn into a rat with a basic chomp attack and a passive ability. The rat is also small and can traverse tight corridors (a throwback to Guacamelee!). You gain experience by completing quests. There is regular XP that levels up your stats and there is form XP, which levels up your forms from rank F to S and grants a few new abilities and ability slots along the way (think of games you've played with a class system--it's basically that, but you have all the classes). You gain form XP by completing quests using form abilities. So, it might say, "Chomp baddies with the rat 50 times," for example. Once you do that and rank up the rat, you'll get new form quests for new abilities.
Once the rat ranks up enough, you unlock new forms. The rat opens up the egg, the ranger, and the guard. As you rank up forms and unlock new ones, you'll eventually be able to mix-n-match form abilities. So you can play as the guard, but equip the rat's chomp, the ranger's arrow strike, and the zombie's life leech passive. There are ultimately 15 forms to unlock, each with three abilities that you can equip on other forms--that's 45 abilities in however many combinations--plus other passive abilities you can purchase (some of which are required to complete quests and dungeons).
Here is where I see more inspiration from Guacamelee!. All of the form attacks have an element associated with them (sharp, blunt, dark, light) and sometimes apply status effects (poison, slow, burn, etc.). Enemies don't have strengths or weaknesses per se (that I am aware of), but some dungeons do have modifiers. The main modifier type is to attach elemental wards on enemies. So, a dungeon might say "Level 40, sharp and blunt," which means that you need to make sure that your form has sharp and blunt attacks to break the wards on enemies before you can damage them. Or, you can have multiple forms at the ready, perhaps one to break sharp wards and one to break blunt wards. I just equipped all the elemental types I needed on one form though because switching forms is a little clunky and you are usually trying to rank up a given form anyway. Dungeons can have other modifiers too, such as increasing/decreasing enemy health or damage, prolonging status effects, being really dark, having enemies you can't knock back, and so on. The dungeon modifiers add some puzzle-like aspects to the game and require a little bit of strategy.
Guacamelee! 2 was heavy on difficult platforming puzzles; these puzzles are about strategizing to break wards and overcome dungeon modifiers, and generally pose no problem. But, there are two crazy dungeons that I never really figured out (though I'm sure grinding to unlock/upgrade abilities is the answer; grinding is always the answer in this game), such as one that multiplies all damage by 9999 (so one-hit kills) and one in which enemy wards quickly regenerate. For the x9999 damage one, the ghost has an ability to ignore all enemy damage, which is probably the trick. I was running out of mana while using it, but I bet if I leveled the ghost up to S rank and upgraded that ability, and equipped other upgraded mana regen abilities, that I could do it. For the ward breaking dungeon, you just need a character that can break those kinds of wards with passive abilities and/or non-mana-using form abilities, and that can stay alive. I'm sure I could have done that one with some more experimentation later on.
Anyway! The game requires that you complete most of the dungeons and overworld quests to complete it because the story ("legendary") dungeons require "stars" to enter. Lots of stars, which you get by...completing quests. So, you'll frolic around the overworld map, with its typical RPG towns and environments, and you'll delve into dungeons, and you'll watch numbers increase and unlock wacky new forms until you kill the final boss. I believe that the levels of dungeons and areas are set at some minimum threshold, and then scale to your level once you discover them, and then they become fixed. The map doesn't tell you what level a dungeon is until you discover it, and then it remains that level. The map also doesn't tell you what level an area is, but when you enter the area, it pops up on the screen. The area levels definitely increased (sometimes?), but I wish the map would tell you what level areas were because the only way to know is to go back to it.
There are two other glaringly absent features. First, in a game about customizing character builds, it is odd that you can't save any builds. This would be useful, especially in new game +, where there are more dungeons with more modifiers. Like, my favorite dark and blunt combo would be nice to save, or my favorite build for a particular farm, so I can quickly use them again. The other, which really was annoying, is that the radial menu, from which you can quick-select forms, only has 8 forms on it. And for some mind-boggling reason, you can't select which forms are on it and you can't select where forms are located on the menu. It just shows the most recently used 8 forms. There should be a way to customize this. Or, there should be a toggle to bring up a "page 2" of the radial menu with the other 7 forms. You switch forms a lot and you will often find that the one you're looking for isn't there because it isn't among the last 8 you used, so you have to go back into the menus to select it. And since it automatically removes the oldest one for the newest one, then something else was bumped off, and the locations of forms change on the radial menu, which is annoying when you're in a battle and trying to--in real-time--switch forms. These two features, and especially the latter, seem like obvious holes.
But, despite the holes where a couple features should be and the grind, this was still a fun game. There are certainly better action-RPGs, but I liked the art, the charm, and the ability to mix-n-match form abilities to tackle dungeons. It could definitely be made more difficult and could add more puzzle aspects!
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