I still remember when Mass Effect was originally being hyped, one of the main points was resurrecting the old concept of carrying forward what you created in the first game to its sequels, like how you could import your parties from Wizardry 1 to its sequels (or even to whole other franchises, because that's how loose things were back then). Then Mass Effect 2 immediately walked back on that, which greatly reduced my interest in the series. Instead of being a celebration of classic RPG design (however awkward and Biowared), it became a burial of it in favor of bog standard cover shooter mechanics.

LISA: The Painful (Steam)

This game was actually free on Epic earlier this year. But I'm an idiot, I missed picking it up because I thought it was available for a week, but it was during the Christmas period where they were offering a free game each day. So, I miss one Epic giveaway in like 4 years and it's a game I really wanted. So, I bought it on Steam. It's the definitive edition which includes this and the sequel LISA: The Joyful.

Anyway, The Painful is the second game after LISA: The First, which is free. The first game is very annoying to play. So much so that I quit it. It's about Lisa, a girl abused by her father and her struggle through her surreal mind to escape. It's about an hour long but could take you much longer because of the arcade style segments where you have to avoid the Marty Spiders...it's not worth it, trust me.

Anyway, the sequel is excellent in every way. It's a full RPG in the style of turn based JRPG's. You play as Brad, who is one messed up dude. He is the brother of Lisa, and he suffers from mental issues and drug addiction. You play in a post-apocalyptic world like Mad Max, except I have the feeling that the world may actually be just as seen through the eyes of Brad and his shattered and drug fueled mind. Anyway, this world has no women- they're all gone, and the currency in this world is porn magazines as a result. So, one day Brad finds a baby girl (Buddy) and decides to protect her- probably as redemption for being unable to protect his sister from their father. Whether Brad succeeds or not is up for debate, he's not hero, just some messed up guy trying to do the best he can.

Gameplay wise, this is traditional JRPG. You can recruit up to 30 team members. Some look to be just joke characters, but most have usefulness that can fit into your strategy. You do need some strategy, as the game does have difficulty spikes where enemies can insta kill you if you don't kill them fast enough. It's not meant for you to get all characters to survive- I'm not even sure it's possible. The game also has true choices that you need to make, that genuinely have gameplay repercussions. For example, you can choose not to take your drugs...but the withdrawal symptoms mean a pretty hefty stats penalty when they hit. I chose to play without taking any Joy. Also, some of your teammates are also addicts and may need the drugs themselves. The game is full of these dilemmas.

Overall, this game is possibly the best Indie RPG I've played. It's really dark yet has funny moments all the way through it as well. It's story centric, yet there is surprising depth to your team balance and their abilities- because the game can be hard. The music track is creepy and matches the world you're in. Definitely worth playing, can be finished with full exploration for around 20 hours.

Scorn, Oct 9 (Xbox Game Pass)-After playing, I have nothing but disdain for this game. The graphics are absolutely horrid, grotesque, disturbing, morbid, everything you would expect. This is the single area in which the game shines. Gameplay is a typical walking sim. There are some light puzzles typically of the slider variety and they are universally bad. I saw a lot of comments saying the game is obtuse and puzzles and things of that nature confusing and I fully disagree. The puzzles all felt very familiar and rote, there was even an annoying picklocking minigame. The was also some combat sections which all felt terrible with the clunky gunplay and movement. Unfortunately I don't think stealth is much of an option in many encounters. Usually I found myself in a narrow hallway or small room and had to fight my way out. Narratively the game makes no sense. I have no idea who my character was in the greater world nor any idea what the world is. The puzzles and environments are basically just an elaborate rube goldberg designed to shock the player with their edginess. The game was scary for the first hour or so while you're still coming to terms with this strange, new world but after introducing the first enemies that quickly went away. All of the enemies looked like variations on Half-Life headcrabs to me and looked about as detailed as the original Half-Life. The enemies and character models in general were the one big letdown in the graphics department. To me the game exists purely for its graphical shock factor and its uninspired puzzles, awkward forced combat sections, and unintelligible narrative ultimately detract far too much for it to be a worthwhile experience.

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LISA: The Joyful (Steam)

This one only took 4 hours, a much more straightforward and linear game compared to The Painful. It is a direct sequel, and it begins right at the moment the previous game ends. This time you play as Buddy, Brads adopted daughter- the only known female in the world. The combat is the same, maybe it starts out harder because you don't really have a team. However, Buddy is younger, fitter and out for vengeance. Soon she is a death dealing machine. Luckily, I played the previous game without taking Joy, the final bonus "joyless" cutscene makes the ending here make more sense. Good game, but it isn't as great as the main game.

Octopath Traveler 2, Oct 11 (Xbox Game Pass)-Phew this game was a marathon. There's a lot of good things and a few things I didn't like. Each character's story was interesting but nothing to write home about. They were definitely a case of quantity over quality with 8 above average stories with no real standouts. The characters themselves were quite varied and I tended to favor certain ones, I never really properly utilized Agnea or even Throne. Ochette was a favorite just because of her silliness. The turn based combat was fun. I enjoyed I enjoyed discovering enemy weaknesses, timing break points, and trying to keep a balanced party. Unfortunately there was a ton of random encounters both in dungeons and overland. They would come as often as once every few seconds which I suppose helps with leveling in the sense that I didn't have to do much actual grinding since I was constantly gaining xp just walking across a screen. The boss fights were both a high and low point. I really liked that most bosses had unique mechanics but I felt if you didn't have the right party combination or exploit some ability combo you would struggle regardless of level. The voice acting was ok but nothing exceptional. The music however, was really good. Overall, I think the game is a little too difficult with the boss battles and takes too much of a more is better approach but its still quite fun.

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Gorogoa, Oct 12 (GOG)-A solid puzzle game, it's in the same vein as Framed and Maquette but better than both I think. You manipulate scenes and images to complete puzzles. It's got an Inception type feel to it with many solutions requiring you to go down several layers for the correct image to progress. It's very short maybe 3 hours max. I would have liked it to be a little longer but it was a short burst of fun.

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Return to Monkey Island (XSX Game Pass)

Well, it's like the others. I never rated the others all that highly, which is sacrilege to some people. I just never found the humor to be all that funny, and in if you take the humor out of Monkey Island you just have average point and click adventure games with annoyingly obtuse puzzles. Of course, there was that guy at work back in 1996 that loved the games so much that he was always quoting Guybrush at work...you know, like those people that endlessly quote Monty Python, except that this guy thought the pinnacle of humor was Monkey Island. He stopped eventually, after we all united and threatened him with bodily harm. This probably soured the series for me further.

Anyway, Return to Monkey Island is just an average point and click adventure. However, if you're like the guy I mentioned above, you'll probably like it far more than me.

MediEvil (PS4)

So, this was one that was sitting on the to do list for quite some time. I originally got it in October of 2020 and played a good bit of it alongside the original. Then at some point I made more progress in the original and beat that game. I ended up getting frustrated with this one and shelved it. But recently I was getting nostalgic for this one (partly since the presidential election season was heating up again and I remembered playing this last time). So, I popped it back in and gave it another try. A few thoughts:

I am not the biggest fan of the way the remake was handled. The main things I dislike are that I don't think the new camera angle was exactly ideal for seeing what you wanted to see for some sections of the game. Also, this game feels much darker than the original, and I mean that it was harder for me to see what I was doing. I don't think it was my TV's settings, I'm pretty sure I was playing it at the brightness intended. Also, I'm not huge on remakes like this and the Legend the Zelda the Wind Waker HD adding a bunch of effects like bloom and SSAO, but I thought it was done better here than in others.

I also thought this game was MUCH harder than the original. I'm not sure if it was me, but I aced the Asylum the first time I tried it in the PS1 original and had to try it like a dozen times in this version. Also, I felt that getting all the upgrades from the chalices as you progressed was nice but not necessary in the original. Well, in this one I felt it was essential to get the chalices (that is until the lightning glove) in every level or else you were in for a really frustrating time. I'm not sure exactly what it was, but I just thought that this game was way harder than the original, special shout-out goes to the Asylum levels and The Enchanted Earth in this regard.

HOWEVER, the one exception was the last level. In the original game I needed to do it like five times before beating it, but this time I got it the first try. Now, it has been four years since I last played the game (this version and the original), so while I remembered the game for the most part some particulars were fuzzy. So, I'm not sure if the redone version of Zarok was just weaker or what but I got him pretty easily this time.

Anyway, still enjoyed it all the same. I kind of liked the art and atmosphere of the original a bit more, but it's definitely worth playing if you've never played the original or if you want to revisit Sir Dan' adventure.

Inscryption, Oct 13 (Xbox Game Pass)-This felt like two different games. I don't want to be too spoilery here so I'll try to be vauge. The first part was weird and creepy and very difficult in the card game. The second and third parts pulled back the curtain and were uninspired, felt very padded, and for the most part were very easy. The game was at its best when you didn't know what was happening and you were gathering clues and solving puzzles. The full game should have been two more sections like the first. Once you got to the second section the game world expanded quite a bit but the gameplay stayed very small and you realize just how small that gameplay is. The overall meta narrative makes sense for the switch in the middle but the game suffers for it.

Slightly more spoilers. The game reminded me of quite a lot of media like Undertale, various Sam Barlow games but specifically Immortality, Pokemon games, Earthbound, Black Mirror (the show not the games), Jumanji, Saw, The Ring, and several episodes of The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Are You Afraid of the Dark.

I enjoyed the game but I think it would have been better to extend the beginning portion for the full game. I think the meta narrative was very weak and rather campy (which was probably intentional) and the actual gameplay for the later sections was lacking. A fully fleshed out escape room plus card game could have been very good. As it is the first section was excellent and the later sections rather average.

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Phantasmagoria

A gem of a FMV adventure game, I finally got around to buying and playing it this month just in time for Halloween. You (p)lay one Adrienne Delaney as she investigates her new home and commits a minor oopsie by releasing an ancient evil. Hijinks, silliness, and a few whacky murders ensue along the way as she attempts to put the proverbial genie back in it's bottle so she and her hubby can try to resume a normal life.

Best character nod: Spaz the cat
Second best character nod: M-o-o-n, that spells special needs guy

Pros
A nice little group of interesting characters
A decent amount of optional scenes found through exploring
Attractive main character

Cons
Quite short
Timed ending (sorta)

Misc
Spaz needed more scenes :)


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Overall Score: 8/10
While the game has some negative aspects I really want to get to the sequel eventually. If one is patient (some scenes drag a bit), likes adventures, and doesn't mind some gore (mainly towards the end) this can be a nice little title.

Super Mario Odyssey. I remember when this came out somehow getting the impression from the advertising that it was Mario going open world and in "the real world". As it turns out, it's basically regular 3D Mario and the real world section is just one level of the game. The gimmick for this one is that Mario's hat gets destroyed when Bowser re-kidnaps Princess Peach and his new hat is a living character named Cappy that allows Mario to possess other creatures when he throws it on them, using their particular abilities to overcome challenges, like a Nintendo take on the movie Get Out.

The way the game breaks down is that Bowser is setting up his wedding to Peach by going to different kingdoms and stealing their treasures to use in the ceremony (e.g., the dress is the treasure of a subaquatic kingdom), so Mario and Cappy use a flying ship to track Bowser through all these kingdoms. In each kingdom you have to acquire a minimum number of power moons (not stars like usual it's totally different now!) to move on. If you want to 100 percent the game like a psycho, you have to get all 999 power moons. IIRC, 250 gets you to the basic ending of the game (i.e., stopping the wedding and saving Peach), while 500 unlocks the secret super-difficult, do it perfectly on one life or start over, go $#!% yourself final level, which is what I settled on.

Structurally the game is basically the same as all the 3D Mario games since Mario 64 - you go into a world and find the collectibles you need, with each one usually having some kind of specific challenge associated with it, like having to master wall-jumping or something like that, and the main ones involve boss fights that usually aren't too difficult. It's a good structure to use and Nintendo has really mastered the pacing so that you'll basically be acquiring enough power moons just by exploring, getting that "I found something!" charge every few minutes, with extras coming if you want to test yourself a bit more, like if you actually like doing the racing missions or something. And Mario generally controls very well and the cap-throwing angle feels less gimmicky than the motion controls of the Galaxy games or the water-spraying machine from Sunshine.

It's probably not a game that will convert anyone that doesn't like Mario or Nintendo games in general, but if you enjoy that sort of thing occasionally, it's done well.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Oct 17 (Xbox Game Pass)-Another enjoyable Tomb Raider experience, at this point though they're all blending together. For that reason I can't say it was really any better or worse than the previous two. It's mostly more of the same which was still fun but I didn't feel like dragging out the game by completing a bunch of side quests. There were a couple of bugs with occasional stuttering/flickering, a couple of weird lighting glitches causing underground caverns to light up like it was full daylight, Lara's hair randomly turned bright white twice, and once Jonah's head completely disappeared. So it was a little disappointing the game wasn't smoother and less buggy.

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Allied General

Still my favorite of the 5 Star General series. I actually began playing this last year, where I played the British and American campaigns. Then, last week I began the Russian campaign- still the best part of any game in the series. The initial battles as the Soviets are difficult because of the Luftwaffe destroying your fighters and soft artillery as fast as you can build them- if you don't know what to do, that is. By mid-campaign I had built a Red Airforce to be feared and then it became easy.

I'm not sure why the series has all the games on GOG except for the first two- Panzer General and Allied General. So, I still have to rely on my CD ROM version. As a pre-Win 95 game, it is annoying to get running now. I cannot even remember how I did it. Years ago, I followed some instructions online on how to put the CD contents into a self-installer- sort of like the GOG installers, complete with all compatibility settings to make it work on 64-bit windows. It's worth getting to run as it is the best in the series, though Fantasy General and Panzer General are close. I still haven't played Star General, which I just got in the SNEG Humble Bundle, so should be soon.

Enderal: Forgotten Stories

Finally, after five years! I started my first try in 2019 and I thought I had gotten about halfway through already (although it was probably more like a third or fourth), but then I stopped playing for some reason or other. Possibly due to being a completionist and feeling overwhelmed with the sheer size of the world, and because I disliked that Enderal, contrary to Nehrim had respawning enemies and loot (after a few days), which made it harder to keep track of the progress in exploring that world. I think at that time, it might not even have contained the "Forgotten Stories" extra content yet. So in 2021 I made another attempt, starting from scratch, and I got even further than the first time but then took a long, long break from it again, partially due to the same reasons, but I think mostly because RL got in the way and then I got distracted by other games. But this time I managed to pick it up again, even 2-3 years later, and I today I reached the ending(s).

I didn't complete everything 100%, but I think I've seen all the quests and all the locations and found a major part of the collectibles and special items. In the end, my character was lvl 66 and I got everything I wanted from 4 different skill trees (Infiltrator/Trickster/Phasmalist/Elementalist), so the sneaky archer combined with summoned soul support and elemental magic as backup to clear large groups when spotted. Felt pretty good, although to be honest, it made most encounters in the second half of the game somewhat trivial. But I didn't mind.

What I liked most about the game was the open world exploration and character builds. In fact, I played through most of the main questline only once I had fully explored the world on my own and finished all the side quests. There are so many things to discover, collectibles, loot, scenery, whatever, because everything is manually placed into the world and all locations are unique and memorable, even if they use the same assets, and I thought that was a pretty astonishing achievement in level design, with a world this big. Of course, the gameplay loop can become a bit repetitive after a while, and yet I was always motivated to check out the next place and see what's in it. And there are so many different biomes and impressive vistas of all colors, not just an endless winter landscape. The open world experience was very satisfying. And likewise all the feats, skills, spells, and the crafting - such a great variety, so many possibilities of what you can do (or ignore, if you don't enjoy it). You can really play the game the way you like.

The storytelling was quite good, too, most of the time. To me, the setting, the characters, the quests, the themes and stories were more engaging than Skyrim, which I haven't beaten to this day. Regarding the main plot, I was a little disappointed that it felt so similar to Mass Effect that it's hard to believe in a coincidence, mixed with ideas reminiscent of Planescape:Torment and (this one most probably *is* a coincidence, but still) the Prophet series for Neverwinter Nights. I like all these games/narratives that I compare Enderal to, so that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just that I already played through all of them before, so there was quite a bit of deja vu for me in Enderal's plot. That being said, it still works well enough. But you have to be okay with it being very, very dark (fortunately, the intro already sets the tone, so players can't say they weren't warned).

Surprisingly, the voice-acting - at least in the original German version I played - was pretty good. And last but definitely not least - the awesome music! And all the great bard songs, in different versions even, same song, sung by different singers, male, female, even instrumental versions, I think. It's mind-blowing how much work has gone into all of this, at what professional level, and yet the whole game is completely free and a much better offering than many commercial AAA games.

I do have to mention that Enderal crashed a lot on me, but since there are a lot of different autosaves (e.g. each time you see a loading screen) and you can manually quicksave everywhere, which I tend to do, I never really lost significant progress and could pick up almost right where I left, after a crash. It was still a bit annoying, but nothing compared to all the fun. The game was also somewhat buggy, occasionally, though I guess that's just the Skyrim engine, and could be fixed with the cheat console in the worst cases.

All in all, I really loved it (and in the end, I didn't even mind the respawning that much ).

During the last month, I also played through a few shorter open world games:

Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip
This is what you get if you cross A Short Hike with GTA and Wuppo. Was fun(ny) while it lasted.

Tinykin
Second try - the first time I quit after the tutorial, being a bit bored with the simplicity of it, but that was clearly a mistake, as the actual levels are much more open and fun with much more things to do. In the end I was sad that it was over already.

Wavetale
This was a bit more guided and restrictive, with less things to do, and while the visuals were very nice and the movement felt quite awesome, the gameplay was a bit too simple and barebones (combat is so trivial it might just as well not exist, side quests are fetch quests, collectables are only for buying outfits, the mechanics stay the same all throughout the game), and the save system was bad, too (side quests are not saved on quitting if not completed yet; not even that you got the quest), so I was actually kind of relieved when the game was over, which is a pity because it had some really cool ingredients. The story wasn't all that special, but nice enough.

Mail Time
This one was also a bit of a disappointment, as it felt more like a visual novel with fetch quests than an open world with exciting exploration. I guess the dialogues could have been cute, but since they went on for so long, I tended to click through them quickly and didn't really care that much for them. It was also quite hard to immediately recognize who is speaking, because as far as I could see, the only indication was a small name tag in the top left or right corner of the big speech bubble in the middle, and everything else stayed more or less the same, not even a color change (IIRC?). This could have been handled better, seeing that the visual novel style dialogues are such a prominent feature here. There wasn't much of interest to discover in the world apart from new characters to talk to, so it seemed mostly like an excuse for the dev to write long, supposedly funny/cute dialogues (sometimes with odd tone changes, from cutesy/naive to anti-capitalist preaching and encouraging crime - I don't mind the themes, was just confused the tonal inconsistency). Because of that, Mail Time reminded me more of the Frog Detective series than gems like A Short Hike.