Blogging the experience of gameplayhttps://www.gamelog.cl/gamers/GamerPage.php?idgamer=1269https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=8011This game is bananas. Do you like skateboarding games? I don’t, unless there’s something really novel about them (the recent Skate Story being one). Do you like racing games? Yes. Do you like being punk rock and sticking it to the man? Yes. Do you like fast speedrunning games and challenging platformers? Sometimes. Neon White was awesome. Do you like Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio? Sure, I like Sega-era nostalgia. Did you enjoy the style of Hi-Fi Rush? Yeah, that was a colorful, super creative game with a kickass soundtrack that came out of nowhere. If you said yes to any of those questions, or maybe to two of them, you might become obsessed with Denshattack. Denshattack is all those things mixed into one. Except instead of a skateboard or a taxi or running, you are driving a train (and on one later track your train rides a skateboard, lol; know your inspiration). This is future Japan. An environmental catastrophe has happened. Everyone lives in secure domed cities managed by the Miraido corporation. Most everyone. Some people—rebels—live outside…in trains? No, I don’t know where they live. But they drive trains. They are Denshattackers…gangs of mostly young and always cool people (gangs are themed around baseball, cute fashion, rockabilly, goth/horror, whatever other subcultural or The Warriors-esque group) who…drive around fighting other gangs by racing them, out-tricking them, and apparently sometimes literally going to war and killing them. They also dislike Miraido, despite Miraido’s cute, funny (evil) mole mascot, and they enjoy tagging and destroying corporate property. Denshattackers and/or Miraido have laid train tracks all over the place for…reasons. You play as Emi, a ramen delivery girl who learns about Denshattack through a random encounter with a Denshattack fan. Long story short, she becomes a pro, defeats all the gang bosses, and together they take on Miraido. The story is absurd, fun, and oddly heart-warming. The game is broken into 9 chapters, each of which takes place in a different gang’s territory. Each chapter has a handful of tracks. Most of these involve just getting to the end, but there are also occasional races (place in the top 3), score attacks (get x score in 2 minutes), and boss fights. Each track also has additional objectives, like picking up x collectibles, doing specific tricks in specific locations, doing things to affect the environment in some way, smashing 10 opponents in a race, etc. One thing I loved about Denshattack is that it has minimal gatekeeping. Most racing/speedrunning/platformer games gatekeep like crazy. You have to get x stars or gold medals to unlock the next area…that kind of thing. There really isn’t gatekeeping in Denshattack. The only thing that came close for me was those score attack tracks (until I learned how to rack up massive combos and easily beat them). I imagine the races are tough for some people, too, since you have to place in the top 3, which means that you can’t crash hardly at all. If you finish the track and meet its main objective, you can proceed. But if you want to strive for perfection, getting gold medals, finding all collectibles, completing additional objectives, you can go nuts replaying tracks. There are some incentives for doing this, such as buying cosmetic items for your trains, buying new trains with different abilities, and filling out Emi’s “book”, which is a fun little way of learning more about the world and Emi’s adventure. I just went straight through though. So, in each chapter, Emi confronts a new gang, and in each chapter, she learns a new skill. Because of these constant additions, Denshattack never got old. First, you learn how to do all the regular tricks. Then it introduces rails and you learn to grind. Then it introduces tunnels and you learn to go off-track to do halfpipes. Then it introduces hanging rails and you learn to swing. Then it introduces magnets and you learn to flip upside down…and so on. The tracks are fast, and once more and more of these elements are added, the tracks become insane. I mean, that’s how I would describe the whole game—it’s insane. Tracks are fast, obstacles everywhere, you’re pulling combos, jumping, dodging, spinning, grabbing, choosing directions, switching tracks, nabbing collectibles, smashing enemies. Reacting constantly as Emi zooms around. Many tracks have big set pieces, so there might be a tsunami, kaiju, wrecking balls, a sawmill, all sorts of stuff going on around you that you can often interact with. And the boss battles are wild, multi-phased tracks oozing with creativity. You might think, “how can they do a boss battle in a skateboarding game?” That’s what I thought about Skate Story too, and it was badass the way it handled bosses. Same with Denshattack, but…insane. The whole game is creatively stunning, the entire time. I kept thinking, “at some point, this will get repetitive” or “wow, no way they can top that,” but it never gets repetitive and nearly every track—certainly every chapter—contains awesome new things that you haven’t seen before. Finally, I appreciate how user-friendly the game is. Taking a cue from hard-as-nails platformers like Super Meat Boy, checkpoints are generous. Usually if you crash, you are set back just a few seconds, so you can fail, try again, see what you did wrong, fail, try again, fail, and succeed, and feel like you overcame something difficult. The game provides the feeling of mastery. Or if not mastery, at least solid proficiency. This gets a strong, strong recommendation from me. So glad it was a day one release while I had a month of Game Pass!Mon, 17 Aug 2026 10:40:12 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=8011&iddiary=13530https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=8010Halo felt like a standard shooter. In that way, it is authentic to the original (standard now, perhaps, but revolutionary at the time). I was never a massive Halo fan. I played some multiplayer in college, but never actually played the franchise until I was like 30 years old. I played the original Halo when it was remastered for Xbox 360. So, I can look at this without nostalgia. And the simplicity was striking. There are no RPG mechanics, no loot, no parries or dodges, no cover. I remember when each of these features was added to FPS games; it’s weird seeing none of them present! You can sprint through levels just like in the original Halo, but that gets hard in the tunnels with all the Flood. Some of those later Flood missions were really annoying with so many enemies crowded into corridors. All the hallway/tunnel areas were pretty abysmal. I’m surprised they didn’t change them. The game adds three new bonus missions. In those, you cannot sprint through everything! You always either have to kill all enemies (then the exit would unlock) or have Johnson unlock the exit (after all enemies were dead). New missions added a some modern elements, but were a bit jank. For example, Johnson had trouble following me. I had to go find him a few times. One time, I had cleared enemies in an area, and he said “alright, let’s go!” and the exit door opened, but he wasn’t there. Then no other door after the exit door would open. I traced my steps back to the beginning of the area, and there is Johnson, stuck on a door (how I heard him say anything, I do not know; perhaps he’s an expert at throwing his voice). I had to reload to get him loose. Another time, I was supposed to clear all enemies in an area. After doing so, the exit wouldn’t trigger, so I was running around, thinking it was because I lost Johnson again. An enemy materialized out of a turret. Killed him. Exit opened. Another time the opposite happened, where the exit opened, as if I’d killed all the enemies, but there was still a red dot on my map. Followed the dot, and it was an enemy, who promptly killed me. Had to start over. I think he was stuck in a corner and the game read him as dead for some reason. So…this was…fine. I feel a bit like I wasted 10 hours. I don’t feel any more knowledgeable about Halo. I just feel like I ran through an old, buggy shooter. But you know what? My (at least) 5-year-old laptop ran a brand new AAA Unreal Engine 5 game on low settings. Go go laptop!Mon, 17 Aug 2026 10:34:27 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=8010&iddiary=13529https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=8009This is an arcade-style beat-em-up mixed with a roguelite. The developers clearly know both genres. The result is interesting for sure. It works for sure. But it only held my attention for about 5 hours before feelings of repetition and boredom set in. I see this as evidence that you can layer most any genre with roguelite elements, but that some genres might tend to produce deeper progression systems and more varied gameplay than others. I am most familiar with the deckbuilding roguelite genre, wherein every run in a great game is full of strategic battles, tough decisions, varied builds, and so on. You’re thinking all the time. In this beat-em-up roguelite hybrid though, I rarely thought. Strategy goes on the back burner, while combat is foregrounded. This should be fine as long as there’s enough variation from run to run, but the combat got old, despite the developers’ attempts to make each character unique and to offer multiple paths and introduce some randomness to keep things fresh. There are four characters who mainly differ in their special abilities (arcanas). They all have a regular 4-hit combo with the X button, a strong attack with the Y button, they can jump, grapple, etc…all similar basic moves. But then for the arcanas, the dwarf attacks with his gun in various ways, the frog uses some magic spells, and so on. More variety comes in the “rituals,” which are elemental attacks. This is part of creating a build during a run. There are six types of rituals: fire, lightning, necromancy, and so on. Fire rituals allow you to do things like set enemies to burn with your X or Y attacks, leave a burning trail behind after dashing, create a flaming wreath around you that hits enemies after you block, and so on. Lightning rituals are all about stacking “static” and discharging it with chain lightning, and creating sparks that track and zap enemies. Water rituals are all about creating tidal waves (which damage and knock back enemies) and bubbles (which allow you to launch enemies into things). Necromancy rituals are all about creating skeletons and stacking spectral armor. More advanced spells are ritual hybrids that do things using two elements. Usually, you trigger burning or spawn skeletons or whatever—the ritual effects—by attacking, dodging, deflecting, or clashing. This is where the game draws inspiration from modern combat systems. Dodge is dodge. You move away from an attack. Deflecting is dodging into an attack. Clashing is using your strong Y attack when an enemy attacks (basically a parry). After any of these three actions, you can press X to “punish” the enemy, which initiates a counter that does extra damage. This reminded me of Space Marine 2’s free pistol shot with R2 after dodging or parrying. So, you are doing all that, triggering all the conditions for your rituals, and by stacking rituals of the same element or that trigger on the same condition, you tend to specialize for a run. For example, you might start a run by getting a fire ritual that says “apply burn to an enemy after X combo finisher.” That means you’re going to use your X regular attack more than your Y strong attack and you’re going to look for more fire or “X” attack rituals. Then you might get a water ritual that causes a wave upon your X finisher. Okay, now you’re really going after the X attack rituals. Alternatively, you might find a lot of rituals that trigger on Y attack, or that trigger on clash, and so on, so I found myself mashing X, or mashing Y, or focusing on clashing, or whatever during each run. Runs themselves start repeating pretty quickly. I was really, really tired of playing the first area (which I did 13 times). And there is the most path variety in that first area. In the others, there are basically like 1.5 paths. The first area has a decent amount of branching. But this is the same concept as other roguelites. You choose to go left or right, or whatever, and balance risk and reward. There might be an easier boss one way with a guaranteed ritual, but a harder boss the other way with a ritual and extra gold. I like that the game weaves quests across your runs, such that even after I beat the game, I still had a few outstanding quests to do. I got pretty far on my own, but I was getting bored and the meta-progression (spend crystals that you earn each run to start with more HP, start with more gold, increase damage in the air, etc., etc.) was starting to feel grindy, so I turned on “assist” mode, made myself invincible, then waltzed through two complete runs so that I saw most everything. Cool game, but didn’t hold my attention that long. I wish runs were more varied and strategic. I think I just prefer deckbuilding or other genres instead of beat-em-ups, so the beat-em-up / roguelite hybrid, while novel, didn’t suck me in.Mon, 17 Aug 2026 10:18:45 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=8009&iddiary=13528https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7968Just finished. What a ride. The Alters is one of the more creative games I’ve played in a long time. It felt a bit like Subnautica in that it’s a survival/crafting game, which I usually dislike, but its oppressive atmosphere and philosophical sci-fi narrative are excellent. It also felt a bit like one of those “timeline” games, like Eternal Threads, although you aren’t technically manipulating an existing timeline; rather, you create “alters,” real versions of yourself that exist in alternate timelines. Here’s the story: You are Jan Dolsky, a “builder” on a space mission to find rapidium, an element that can solve serious earthly problems like food shortages and save humanity from itself. Upon nearing a planet, there’s an accident on the ship and everyone dies except you. The quantum computer (the ship’s big super brain) could only choose one life to save, and it calculated that you had the best odds of survival. You wake up and, to save yourself, the base, the mission, and possibly all of humanity, you embark on a biological project to clone yourself. A bunch of times. This is…highly illegal. Yet here are your alters: Scientist Jan, Technician Jan, Botanist Jan, Miner Jan, and so on, maybe like 10 of them. They are all distinctly you, but in different timelines as calculated by the quantum computer. And yet they are not you. They are aspects of your self, yet are their own unique selves, while sharing core memories. Their memories branch from yours at various points in your life (lives). For example, several might stay with your abused mother instead of leaving to go to college. One of those who stays might confront your abusive father, while another leaves for a job abroad. One who goes to college might not finish. A few meet a woman and fall in love. One meets a man and falls in love. Worker Jan becomes a union leader. Miner Jan loses an arm in a mining accident. Botanist Jan never develops a strained relationship with your wife, whereas she left you and some of the other alters, and so on. They all have their own values and life goals and their own lessons to impart based on their unique life experiences, and these lessons—working with your alters to accomplish your mission—help you become the best version of Jan you can be. I think that you are required to have some alters, like the Scientist (the only one who can research things) and the Technician (who plays a key role in the story and whose skill is quickly fixing things around the base). Others, it seems like you can pick and choose. For example, I never created the doctor, the guard, or the shrink. Actually, these last three, I realized at the end of the game that I could have made them in Act 3, but I just wasn’t thinking straight. So actually, I completed Act 3 with half the alters I could have had. Oops! There was another part of the game where I was supposed to have four different alters, but I didn’t realize that I could make a fifth until I could make a sixth, so I spent like 10 in-game hours with one less alter. This led to a funny error on my part. In the beginning of the game, the Technician is grumpy from sleeping on the floor and asks you to build a dormitory. He’s happy when he has a bed. The dormitory has 4 beds for 4 alters. By the time I got more than 4 alters, a big chunk of the game had gone by, and I forgot that the dormitory only held 4 alters when I created my fifth and sixth ones. After I created my fifth and sixth ones, my alters started getting in really bad moods! I couldn’t figure out why. Then, one day, the Technician tells me he’s tired of sleeping on the floor and when am I going to get him a bed. I was like, dude, what are you talking about? You have a bed. I built a dormitory forever ago. Then I realized the dormitory only holds 4 alters, so after I went to 6 alters, 2 were sleeping on the floor somewhere. Then I laughed because the Technician was the first or second alter I created, and he got one of the first beds. Why would he not have a bed later? Why wouldn’t one of the NEW alters not have a bed? It’s like they kicked him out of the dorm, haha. Of course, it’s just that complaining about the lack of beds was Technician dialogue, and so once I fell short of beds again, he was going to complain about it again. Here’s another story related to the tough decisions about resource management and task prioritization. One time, I had agreed with the Worker (who was a big union leader in his timeline) not to make my alters work overtime for five days. Easy enough. I had only imposed overtime once or twice the whole game. Then I had another request from another alter during a dispute resolution to stockpile 10 radiation filters within five days. I was coming down to the wire on being able to produce the radiation filters, so I made my alters work overtime. But I forgot about my agreement with the Worker. Not only did the Worker get pissed off at me, but I missed the radiation filter deadline by just a few hours. So I failed both requests! The complexity of the interactions between all the alters led to numerous funny, odd, confusing, and/or stressful moments like these. Anyway, you need your alters to mine elements, grow food, make repairs, create items—all those survival game tasks. YOU, though, regular Jan, you don a space suit and explore the environment, searching for mineral deposits, discovering and neutralizing anomalies, and doing various tasks relating to getting the hell off this planet (because the sun is coming and it will fry you all to death). This is a major part of the game, which is basically split between exploring the planet and managing the base/alters. The exploration part happens in the morning/daytime/evening. You’ll run around, map out the area (in each act, the base gets stuck in a new area), find mineral deposits, build mining outposts, connect the mining outposts to your base via a network of pylons, kill anomalies, do other mission-critical tasks, and you can assign your alters various tasks in the base (growing food, prepping food, researching, repairing, creating items in the workshop, etc.) and outside the base (mining). At 8pm, you get “tired” and your work efficiency is cut in half. Then when the sun goes down, the planet is bathed in radiation, too much of which will kill you. Time to return to base. At 11pm, you become “exhausted” and will wake up later the next morning for every additional minute you stay awake. This very much mirrors my own sleep schedule, haha. Your alters also have defined work hours based on their moods, which you must manage. Extremely pissed off alters will only work 4 hours per day. Extremely happy alters will work 12 hours per day. Mostly happy or slightly bummed alters will work 9 and 7 hours, respectively. You can affect their moods by talking to them, giving them mementos you find, fulfilling their requests, preventing/curing their radiation sickness and injuries, sending them to the therapist, playing beer pong with them (silly minigame), watching movies with them, and so on. Their mood worsens due to a variety of factors as well. There is a lot to manage here, but it’s all handled really well. I haven’t even mentioned the electrical storms, the base weight management, and any story bits that you have to deal with, often relating to ethical decisions. There is a larger story here about the corporation whose mission you were on. They want rapidium. A rogue scientist wants your alters. You’ll occasionally talk to them, and they’ll both be trying to help you get off the planet to serve their own interests. There are several different endings depending on a variety of choices you make. I got the “good” ending, which isn’t really “good” per se, but most of us survived. In the end, like I said, the game is really unique. It’s philosophical, funny, nerve-wracking, charming, and strategic. I liked all the alters that I created. I often thought they were annoying at first (looking at the Scientist, who comes off as superior to the other alters and likes to tell them how to do their jobs, which pisses them off, and the Miner, who is severely depressed and causes significant problems when created until you help him resolve his issues). Strongly, strongly recommend.Mon, 17 Aug 2026 10:12:16 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7968&iddiary=13527https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7847After working on this for the third time on a PS Plus subscription, I’m gonna give it up. Hours 18-23. Re-familiarize myself with the game. Die, die, die. Make it to the Act 1 boss, Phrike. Die. Quit. The longer I play, the more I die and start over, the more grindy and repetitive it gets. See, I opened up a path straight to Act 3 after my one excellent run the last time I played (nearly a year ago), but if you go straight to Act 3, you’ll be severely under-powered. You have to at least sprint through Acts 1 and 2 to try and get health upgrades, some good parasites, find a nice weapon, etc. And you so easily die and end your run. Again, I find myself doing this at the end of my PS Plus subscription. It’s got several more days on it. I don’t think I’ll have time to beat this (if I even wanted to anymore), I don’t have time to beat God of War: Ragnarok. So I’m left with just a couple short games. Update: I’m going to buy this and try to learn it again, and try to play co-op with Joey. Update: I have purchased a physical disc. I will go slower with it and enlist Joey for assistance! I won't let Returnal defeat me!Mon, 17 Aug 2026 10:06:26 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7847&iddiary=13526https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=8008I was a little unsure about Dispatch because I typically don’t care for superhero media and because I doubted that it would be much different than other Telltale Games games (which had long since peaked). Luckily, my hesitation was unfounded. Dispatch is incredible, the best Telltale Games style game since peak Telltale era, even surpassing The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us in some areas. The writing is smart, funny, and it’s more adult than I imagined, also with more dick jokes than I imagined. I loved the extremely creative characters, their relationships, the voice acting, music, animations, gameplay mechanics, everything. It stumbled a little when some choices didn't seem to matter. For example, sometimes the game really wants to keep alive dialogue options that I didn't choose. Other characters will refer to something I didn’t say, not necessarily as if I said it, but as if I wanted to say it. And I had some issues playing this on Luna (choppy, lagging, freezing, and even crashed on the last boss fight) and with a controller (input lag, which was Luna’s fault, and it kept switching to keyboard input, possibly because of Luna lagging, all of which was very annoying during dispatch, hacking, and QTEs). Luckily, a narrative game is still playable with those issues. Thank goodness it wasn’t a soulslike or something! The main difference between this and older Telltale games is the addition of the “dispatch” gameplay. The story (basically) goes that you are a superhero forced into a temporary hiatus, and you go to work as a dispatcher for a larger superhero organization. You get a roster of heroes whom you manage, upgrade, and send on missions from your office computer. The heroes have five or six character stats, plus a couple special abilities, and as they level up, you allocate points in character stats in order to have a well-rounded team. So, for some heroes, you’ll want to dump points into strength and vigor, while for others, you might choose intelligence and charisma. Each stat is useful for a range of scenarios in missions. You don’t necessarily know what stats (and therefore which characters) will be ideal for each mission, so you try to figure it out by interpreting key words in the mission description. For example, a mission might say that there is a hostage situation and that you should send heroes to protect innocent civilians, reason with the attackers, and convince them to release the hostages. “Protect,” “reason,” and “convince” might be bolded in the description, which means they are key words that associate with character stats. If you ever need to “protect” people, keep people safe, defend, withstand an assault, that kind of thing, then you’re looking at the vigor stat. If you need to do anything that requires thinking, logic, reasoning, figuring stuff out, and so on, you are dealing with the intelligence stat. Persuading, convincing, making a good impression, being suave, that kind of stuff is the charisma stat. And so on. It’s not always obvious. Key words sometimes seem like they could be multiple stats. Part of the fun is getting better and better at figuring out which kinds of actions each stat covers. Anyway, you have 1-4 hero slots per mission, and after missions, characters have to return to base and rest. So, you have to use all your characters, and this part of the game really becomes about resource utilization. Sometimes during dispatch, you have to hack security cameras and stuff. This minigame was pretty fun and has several challenging elements, such as “viruses” that kill you if they touch you, locked ports that require you to find and memorize key codes, etc. Hacking isn’t a really big part of the game, but you will occasionally have to do it. My main critique of the hacking minigame is that I would really like to be able to scroll and see the whole hacking map. Later on though, the game used "not being able to see ahead" as a challenge, which I appreciated, but sometimes it was annoying not to be able to see what was ahead. Also, that was the main part of the game that sucked with Luna’s issues, because you are moving around this grid and there are viruses chasing you and time limits. So the game lagging, or the input switching to keyboard, messed me up a couple times. The verdict on Dispatch is that it’s a must-play. I’ve been recommending it to everyone. If you’re an Amazon Prime member, it’s available for free on Luna right now. Take advantage of it!Mon, 17 Aug 2026 10:03:12 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=8008&iddiary=13525https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=8007A new genre for me! The “backrooms” / “anomaly” genre. Do I like it after this first foray? Sort of. I’m not sure how representative The Exit 8 is, but let’s dissect it. Your goal is to walk through a hallway in a subway to get to “exit 8” and leave. The hallway is haunted or something. There are anomalies, ways in which the hallway changes. If you don’t see an anomaly, you should proceed through the hallway. If you see an anomaly, you should turn around. Either way, you are presented with another version of the hallway. If you are correct (you correctly identified an anomaly and turned around, or you correctly noted that there were no anomalies and continued onward), then you’ll proceed to the next version of the hallway (these are numbered 0-8). If you mess up, you start back at the beginning, at hallway 0. Each version of the hallway is randomized, and apparently anomalies won’t repeat themselves in your save file, so I guess eventually you will see (or miss) all of them. Anyway, in this hallway, there are six posters, one sign, some security cameras, overhead lights, a yellow tile path, three doors, two vents, and a man who walks past you. This is all normal. The anomalies, the things that can change, vary from super obvious to super subtle. For example, various obvious things can happen with the man. He might smile (he’s normally not smiling), he might be very tall, he might follow you around (creepy), he might never show up. The lights might be bright yellow (normally white), they might flicker or go out. Subtler things might be a pair of eyes on a poster that follows you, a red light on a security camera (normally no light), an image of a face on the ceiling, and however many others that I didn’t notice during my play through. In other words, it’s like a hidden object game. You’re presented with a normal room and then have to find the hidden anomalies in subsequent variants of the room. You scan posters, walls, doors, floors, looking for anything amiss. I think that’s where the suspense of these types of games comes in. It is unnerving trying to find some change in the environment. You start to get paranoid, questioning what is normal and what is not. I was looking for changes in dates, in text, on the posters, tiny, tiny things. Changes in individual tiles on the walls. Changes in the man’s hair or pants length. I was looking way too closely. Yet at the same time not close enough, given how much I missed. I would be interested in playing one of these with a larger story, perhaps, and some other gameplay elements. This, The Exit 8, alone was a brief, simple experience, but it did hold my attention, I did feel a little creeped out, I did jump one or two times, I did get frustrated when I turned the corner and saw I was back at 0 (meaning I had missed an anomaly).Mon, 17 Aug 2026 09:57:28 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=8007&iddiary=13524https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=8006Neva, from the developer of Gris, is in the same vein. It’s another 2d platformer, this time with light combat and a companion, the titular Neva, a cool wolf. I definitely enjoyed it, and it got better as it went on, as the combat and platforming became more complex. The first half of the game felt very much like “I’ve seen all this before.” It takes place in four seasons (chapters) over a year, and in each season, Neva grows and develops some new ability that you can use. I liked when I could launch Neva at enemies! I think that was chapter 3. Anyway, the game definitely stands out for its beautiful audiovisual style. It’s gorgeous to look at, and it plays with scale, zooming in and out to show you and Neva in relation to the environment. Combat is pretty easy. Bosses have 3 or 4 attacks with clear tells. None of them took me more than 5 tries. And they’re quick fights. Platforming is also pretty easy and fairly basic, though there are some cool elements introduced later. The mirror part is a highlight. The game itself is linear, and the story is whatever. Bad vibes turn the forest black and corrupt all the animals (very Studio Ghibli) and you need to kill the bad vibes and restore life to the forest. I mean, if you’ve played Gris and Limbo and Journey and all the other pretty/moody/atmospheric indie platformer hits of the past 10 or 15 years, you might not find much new here. But it does what it does well, and it was nice for an afternoon.Mon, 17 Aug 2026 09:51:40 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=8006&iddiary=13523https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=8004Sweet indie game about an immigrant family and cooking. It tells a short, simple story with some feeling about an Indian couple in Canada who has a son. They struggle to assimilate, to work, and over the years, to raise, connect with, and understand their child. He, too, struggles to forge his own identity, being pulled in one direction by the culture in which he grows up and in the other direction by his parents. The mother is the main character, and she connects with her family (both in Canada and back home in India) through cooking. She has her mother’s old recipe book and makes this or that throughout the story—to celebrate a birthday, to make her sick child feel better, etc. Cooking is the gameplay. Cooking the dishes is like solving little puzzles, as the recipe book is damaged, so some instructions are always missing. If you know how to cook (especially Indian food), this will be much easier! I do not, so it was challenging, lots of trial and error, trying to reason through the recipes. It was always satisfying to figure out how to cook the meal, and it really did make me hungry for Indian food. I think on Saturday we are going to eat at a good Indian buffet when we’re in town. After you finish the game, there is an actual recipe book with un-damaged recipes. I want to copy them down and make something! Anyway, I really liked the hour and change I spent with this. Nothing groundbreaking or anything, but it was nice, perfect to play while I was sick on the couch (and the game starts with the main character, Venba, being sick on the couch too!).Mon, 17 Aug 2026 09:47:36 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=8004&iddiary=13522https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=8003I don’t have too much to say about this one. It was big, dumb fun, more or less what I remember from the first one. This one is multiplayer focused though. The single-player campaign basically trains you in combat, core mechanics, and game modes, then says, “Hey, now go play online!” The campaign’s narrative was about as easy as one can be to follow for a Warhammer game. Lots of Warhammer lore and jargon, confusing at times what in the world characters were referring to, but general enough to make sense of. You play as Titus, an Ultramarine pulled out of banishment to lead a squad on some important missions for the human empire. Important missions culminate in defeating a Chaos bad guy who wants to…I don’t know…destroy / re-make / purge the world. He had a giant crystal and was doing Bad Things. His boss fights were fun to play, but he talked throughout all of them, and I couldn’t hear him over the noise of combat, so I don’t really know what he was ranting about the entire time. Like, the ENTIRE time. If there were 15 minutes of fights against him, this guy yelled for 15 minutes. Combat is the game’s highlight, brutal and crunchy, though it is simple, even by FFXVI standards. It’s a third-person action game with shooting and melee. Guns and melee weapons are super basic. Guns either shoot bullets or plasma (which can overheat). You either have a pistol, a machine gun, a sniper rifle, or a flamethrower. Melee weapons are like four versions of the same thing, all with the same move set, which boils down to weak attack and strong attack. They vary in whether they are better against a solo enemy or groups. Really doesn’t matter what you choose. Just change your weapon in combat to suit the situation. There are a few types of grenades. You can carry two health packs. They’ve added the standard parry/dodge stuff. See a blue reticle on an enemy? L1 to parry. Or, this is Warhammer, so it’s more like a violent counter. See an orange reticle? Dodge. If you pull off a perfect parry or dodge, or sometimes if you smash through a group of enemies, you’ll see a little red target on an enemy. You can pull R2 to fire a powerful shot at them and restore some health and armor. This was a neat move. Stronger enemies can also be weakened, readying them for an execution, which also restores some armor. Enemies are generally basic horde-mode type enemies. Lots of small grunts. Lots of mid-sized dudes who can be dangerous if you leave them alone, especially the one who stands back and shoots purple plasma at you and the faster one with dual swords. But, they’re all easy enough. Plus, you have two squad mates with you at all times who do a good job of killing stuff. Bigger enemies and the few bosses are more fun and challenging. I liked fighting the big hulking things (forgot the name) that barrel around trying to smash you. Enemy variety is thin though, and slogging through them did become repetitive. Though I think there is “slogging” on purpose. Your main enemies are the…swarm…guys. Whatever they’re called, I forget. There are supposed to be tons of them. Missions often occur in the context of larger battles, which you can see happening in the background. It’s visually striking to be fighting enemies, seeing hordes of others running in the background, ships flying by dropping bombs, and so on. The game does a great job of putting you in the midst of war. Another cool thing (theoretically) is that, in some missions, you have a second squad that achieves some other objective necessary for your own progress. After those missions, you can play a special mode called Operations to see what that other squad did. I gather that Operations are objective-based missions (plant the bomb, defend the flag, survive the waves, etc.) that train you for multiplayer mode, though I was never motivated enough to try one. Just wanted to get through the campaign! When I got to the credits, I saw that all the names appeared Russian. Looked it up. Developed by a studio in St. Petersburg. Lots of discussion online about whether said studio should be supported. Apparently they were moved to Armenia during the war. Can’t imagine developing a game during wartime (or being able to accomplish much of anything), no matter which side you’re on. Lots of people yelling back and forth calling each other political slurs. Didn’t expect that to cap my time with Space Marine 2, but such is how it ended, reading 15-year-olds online screeching about how this game was hypermasculine and not woke because it was made by Russians. Game was big dumb fun, though straightforward and with little variety; Reddit commentary just dumb. Both skippable.Mon, 17 Aug 2026 09:44:49 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=8003&iddiary=13521