Oh boy, my gametime really went down in March, especially compared to February. I was so worried about the retro game repository Myrient shutting down that I spent weeks getting the rest of the games I was interested in emulating downloaded so I didn’t have to take even more time perusing different websites to try to find them. I then went a step further and decided to get them all integrated into Playnite as well to make sure they’re all the correct files and ready to be played. Now all I have to do is the actual testing to make sure they work and then move them to my backlog, but I’ve decided I spent enough time on emulation stuff already, so I’ll do that later. For now, I’m shifting my focus back on Game Pass before Microsoft’s new leadership totally messes it up. Anyway, I think that’s enough doom and gloom for one blog intro. Let’s move on to the acquisitions, and it's a big one this time.
Game Acquisitions
As you can see, I got way more games than usual in March. That’s because I bought the itch.io No ICE in Minnesota charity bundle back in February and finally got around to picking out the games I was interested in playing and adding them to the HLTB database and my backlog. My Steam Family also purchased a couple games and played a bunch of free visual novels that looked interesting, so I added them to my backlog as well. I was also up to my usual shenanigans and purchased a few bundles while convincing myself not to buy even more because my backlog has reached absurd levels. Now that I can see how many retro games I want to play, I can officially say that I’ll be in the top 50 on the most backlogged list on HLTB when I finally get around to getting them added. Not exactly a milestone I wanted to reach, but it is what it is. In any case, there’s a lot of solid games here. I think I’m most looking forward to StarVaders, it looks like a really cool tactics roguelite Deckbuilder combo.
# of Games: 196
Total Money Spent: $43.59
Price/Game: $0.22
# of Games YTD: 290
Total Money Spent YTD: $128.32
Price/Game: $0.44
Game Recaps
And here we can see the monument to my gaming failure. I’m exaggerating, of course, I have no obligations or expectations to game as much as possible in any given month. After spending nearly 100 hours on my favorite hobby in February though, “only” managing to reach 38 hours in March is admittedly a little disheartening. Even with the gametime I had, I still managed four completions. I finished up the very obscure indie game Kaiju Control Force in co-op with my friend. It was unfortunately very anticlimactic due to the myriad of bugs, but I somehow still had a good time. We also went on to complete another small indie game with Dordogne. This was a much more competently produced title. Lastly, we played a super short indie horror game called Rose and Cross. It was…something. I also finally got back into single-player gaming with the continuation of my Final Fantasy journey with III. Speaking of, IV has been confirmed for Game Pass this month so now I’m confident I’ll get to play the entire Pixel Remaster collection for free. I can’t wait; I’ve heard the quality really ramps up with the SNES titles. Between III and IV though, I’m playing through a roguelike deckbuilder called Death Howl. I like everything about it except the difficulty. That’s starting to grate on me and may cause a retirement, but I want to give it more time. And last but certainly not least, I finally got to play a little bit more of Stranded Deep with my other co-op friend that I haven’t played anything with since August. Hopefully that becomes a regular thing again at some point, we used to play much more consistently than we have in the last few years. Here are playlists for everything I played and recorded in March or any videos uploaded in March. The first Final Fantasy III video will be up April 5th and Death Howl will be April 26th.
Game Reviews
Kaiju Control Force
There’s not much to be said about this little single-screen platformer. You and up to one friend have to work together to buy items at a shop to activate a handful of terminals to proceed to the next level while avoiding various types of mutant rats. Sometimes the power goes out so you have to knock out a rat and put them on a treadmill to restore the power. Killing a rat provides gears which act as the currency to buy shop items like the aforementioned terminal keys, extra lives, and planks to cover up the vents the rats spawn from. There are an impressive number of enemy types for such a small game such as battery-carrying ones that shoot electric balls at you to ones holding toxic barrels that occasionally spill stuff you have to avoid to pilots that shoot homing missiles at you. There are only six levels in the game, and the first couple are pretty easy, but you can quickly become overwhelmed if you don’t complete a level quickly enough without boarding up the vents because the spawn rate gets crazy.
While I did enjoy this basic game for what it is, it is also unfortunately riddled with bugs. Sometimes items you buy at the shop disappear from your hand and appear somewhere else. Sometimes you stop being able to pick anything up which causes you to be almost completely useless and rely on your co-op partner to finish the level. Sometimes, and most egregiously, you would start a level where your co-op partner and the enemies just don’t spawn at all which means you can’t beat the level and have to restart the whole thing. These weren’t one-off occurrences either, bugs like these happened on every single attempt. This also included a bug where after we finally beat the last level, the game just didn’t end, and we missed out on the ending cutscene. I wasn’t expecting much, but I was still looking forward to seeing it. I couldn’t find any footage of it online either as it seems nobody else recorded themselves beating the game, so my victory feels hollow as a result. I probably would’ve given the game a 7/10 if it worked properly but it almost never did. Even with all of these issues, it was still a mostly enjoyable co-op platforming experience. Just don’t set your expectations too high.
Time to beat (Main) - 4h:2m
Rating – 6/10
Dordogne
Dordogne is a short, narrative-driven adventure game about a 32-year-old woman named Mimi who visits her grandmother’s house after her death having only been there for a month 20 years prior. It’s clear there is something going on from the get-go. She receives texts from her dad telling her not to go there and to come home, which she refuses. Exploring the house, she remarks how she remembers almost nothing about it, but starts to slowly regain her memory over the course of the game. This implies that there is some deeper familial conflict going on, and a traumatic event that stopped her from remembering anything or being allowed to come back. The story is the main focus of the game, so I won’t spoil any more of it here.
Dordogne is split up into two sections across each of its eight chapters: the present-day (2002) where Mimi wanders the property while trying to recover her memory and respond to texts from her parents and friends. When she finds an object of significance, it cuts back to 1982 when she was staying at the house. While there, you still explore the house, but you also participate in a couple different minigames, talk to your grandmother, explore the surrounding area, and make a new friend. I would describe this as a walking simulator as walking and reading is most of the game, and the minigames and exploring sections have no real fail states. When you finish up whatever you remembered in the past, you make a page in your scrapbook with whatever collectibles you found in that chapter, then the chapter ends and the next one begins with you back in the present.
The big standout of this game is the art style. Everything except the characters looks like it was ripped straight from watercolor. For the most part this works, and it makes the game very pleasing to look at. However, especially at the beginning, it makes it kind of difficult to navigate since you were moving through a 3D world made up of 2D watercolor objects which sometimes threw off my perception. There were also a couple instances where the watercolor textures were wrapped around truly 3D objects which I felt clashed and highlighted the low detail of the environment. The game also got quite repetitive, even with its short runtime. Every chapter you navigate the same house, look at the same objects where Mimi might have something new to say about them, go back in time, talk to your grandma, then look at all the same stuff again. The minigames attempted to break up the monotony to mixed success. The story, while somewhat predictable and low stakes, was still enjoyable enough to carry me through the experience, and voicing the characters with my friend was fun as usual. If you’re looking for a simple narrative game with a pleasing art style and don’t think you’ll be bothered by the lack of challenge, I can safely recommend Dordogne.
Time to beat (Main+Extras) - 4h:45m
Rating – 7/10
FINAL FANTASY III
As the last Final Fantasy game to originally release on the NES, I felt that the third installment was a solid conclusion to that era of the franchise. This was one of the few entries in the series that I knew almost nothing about, and I was worried it was because the game was so bland that it would be forgettable. I’m happy to report that I didn’t find it bland at all. In fact, this might be my favorite entry yet, if only by a little.
The first thing I noticed when starting the game was that the story was once again at the forefront. I’m sure this will be common for all entries moving forward, but after the lack of one in the first game, I still feel like it’s worth mentioning. It’s still not the strongest story around, but there are a couple interesting elements. One of them occurs in the endgame so I don’t want to spoil it here. The first though was the discovery of a second world map underneath the one you start on. The world has already been mostly destroyed before the start of the game, but you bring it back from the brink and unlock a whole new world to explore which was pretty cool. There’s even technically a third map under the ocean of the second, but there are only a handful of locations and enemies there, so I don’t think it really counts. I think the biggest complaint I have about the story, and one of only two major complaints I have with the game, is that the characters you play as reverted back to the first game by having no names. This unfortunately made it so I felt no connection to them which in turn made it hard to care about the story. Story is one of the main reasons I enjoy RPGs in the first place so it’s a shame they went back to nameless protagonists after having named ones in the second game. My understanding is that this is resolved for all future entries, so I look forward to enjoying the stories again.
The second thing I noticed was the origin of the job system; a series staple I believe. You start out as a party of useless Onion Knights but slowly unlock different jobs over the course of the game. While I eventually settled into my niche of jobs and enjoyed playing to their strengths, the job system was also the source of my second major complaint with this game. There are SO MANY jobs and it’s not exactly clear which ones you should be using most of the time outside of a couple scenarios where the game outright tells you. I felt very overwhelmed as more and more jobs kept piling up and I eventually just went back to the original jobs I got after ditching the Onion Knight at the beginning. Some jobs have direct upgrades which made things a little easier and I ended up beating the game with a Knight, Ninja, Devout, and Sage. I ran with a Ranger, Dragoon, and Scholar for short bursts throughout the story but didn’t stick with them for long, and I couldn’t really find a use for the myriad of other jobs. Another unfortunate aspect of the job system is that there was a lot of equipment you could buy in shops that could only be used by one or a small number of jobs which felt like an unnecessary compartmentalization. Every time I came across a shop that only sold say geomancer or summoner gear, I felt like I was missing out and wondered if I was playing the game wrong. I didn’t want to waste money on them either in case it ended up being a job I didn’t like, nor did I want to spend the time leveling up that job in hopes that it ended up getting better than the high-level jobs I already had. As a result, there was a lot of equipment and special abilities that I just never got to experience, and I wonder if maybe I missed a key aspect of the game. It made me appreciate in the second game that every character could wield any equipment and learn any spell so you could play them exactly how you wanted.
It feels like I’m complaining a lot, but I still enjoyed my time with the game. The combat system was reminiscent of the first game, but with way more classes and interesting abilities tied to those classes. The world was the most interesting and straightforward to explore so far in the series. Most of the side characters were fun to talk to and had just enough depth to them to not feel like cardboard cutouts to deliver exposition. It’s worth mentioning that I also found this to be the easiest Final Fantasy I’ve played so far. I count this as a positive as the first two games had a handful of frustrating difficulty spikes that I didn’t experience here, which is greatly appreciated. Others might see that as a negative and want more challenge out of their games. For everyone else who wants to experience a classic turn-based RPG and is open to messing around with the rudimentary job system, I can recommend Final Fantasy III.
Time to beat (Completionist) - 18h:31m
Rating – 7/10
Rose and Cross
This is a very short horror game about a guy who goes out to a remote farm to investigate rumors of a crazy cult in the area. I’m gonna be honest, there’s not a lot to talk about here. There are only two sections to this game: the barn in the cornfield to get the crowbar to open the second area, the house. The house consists of a front room, bathroom, kitchen, and attic. The attic is where most of the plot moves forward as it has a pentagram on the ground, a picture of how the summoning circle should be set up, and instructions to gather four items around the house to recreate the ritual. After getting each item, something scary might happen like a lightbulb breaking or a monster suddenly appearing and phasing through you while making a scary noise. There are a couple notes you can collect from a previous victim of the ritual but that’s everything for collectibles. There is no voice acting, but occasionally you’ll see captions on the bottom of the screen as if the main character is silently thinking to themselves.
I have a lot of grievances with this game. The first thing I noticed is that the game employs mouse acceleration with no way to turn it off, so your view slowly comes to a stop every time you stop the mouse instead of immediately, and that makes it feel weird to control the entire time. While the ambient noises are alright, there are only a handful of them, so you’re hearing the same noises over and over again which quickly dissipates the tension they should be heightening. There are no interaction animations, when you walk over to pick something up or place something, the objects just appear and disappear as if by magic. The biggest offender in my opinion though is that it was very clear that English was not the developer’s first language. There are grammatical errors in almost every thought which is very distracting. The only positive things I can say about this game are that it did have some effective scary moments and it was mercifully short. It might be worth it for free if you want a few jumpscares, but I wouldn’t pay for this experience.
Time to beat (Completionist) - 42m
Rating – 4/10
Stats
It’s funny seeing the acquisition bar shoot up so much for March. This won’t be a regular occurrence since the itch.io charity bundles are few and far between. My spending seems to be pretty consistent from month to month though which is interesting. I don’t put any caps on what I spend so this is just a fun coincidence. You can also clearly see how much my playtime went down but that should also be a one-time thing due to the emulation stuff. I should be going back to a more regular schedule moving forward.
Conclusion/Upcoming
Hopefully this will be my lowest performing month this year and will only go up. My upcoming plans from the February update were completely thrown out the window in March. I didn’t get to Mythwrecked before it left Game Pass, nor did I get to Inscryption, Balatro, or Little Rocket Lab. On top of that, my Game Pass list has been shuffled a bit with fluctuating review scores and new additions to the service. As a result, I can only say with relative certainty that I will be playing Death Howl and Final Fantasy IV in April. If I manage that, the next game on my list will probably be Inscryption. Balatro and Little Rocket Lab are still relatively high on the list, but I don’t expect to get to them anytime soon. On the bright side, taking weeks off gaming will get me caught up on my YouTube uploads much quicker than I expected, especially if I continue not recording some of my playthroughs. Anyway, that’s all for now, I’m gonna get back to Death Howl. Thanks for reading!
Backlog total: 4,088 (+191)
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