I want to start this update by pointing out a milestone I reached on the HLTB site. I mentioned this briefly in the previous update and I thought it would take some more time and many more emulated games under my belt, but it happened way sooner than expected. I have officially entered the top 50 most backlogs of any user on the site. This is not a milestone I planned or expected to hit, but it looks like my cataloging and purchases have caught up to me. I’ll definitely get through these someday, right? Anyway…
PC Game Pass continues to be worth the $0 I’m spending on it. And the new Xbox CEO actually lowered the price in a surprising move so Microsoft Rewards will continue to be enough to pay for it for the foreseeable future. I still think I’m in for a reckoning by the time Project Helix comes out since it’ll play PC games too. They’re gonna have to combine PC and Ultimate tiers at some point and raise the price. I’ll continue to focus on Game Pass games while I still can, and I feel like I’ve barely made a dent in my list. In other news, I’ve finally started the next Tales game! I was gonna go with Eternia next, but with the rumored remaster on the horizon, I’ve decided to skip ahead to Tales of Destiny: Director’s Cut, a Japanese-exclusive PS2 remake of the second game in the series. Of course, I am playing it in co-op with my friend too just like Phantasia. More on that in the game recap section.
Game Acquisitions
Holy consumerism Batman! I spent way more than I thought I did. There were so many good bundles last month that I just couldn’t resist. My spending continues to trend upwards. At least my Steam family expressed excitement at some of these. A lot of deckbuilders too, or would dicebuilders be a more accurate descriptor? This might partially be because I enjoyed Inscryption so much and am trying to chase that high. There were a good number of freebies too from Epic, Amazon, and itch.io. Going back to the topic of deckbuilders for a second, I think the game I’m most looking forward to from this month is Wildfrost. It looks super polished and has great reviews.
# of Games: 97
Total Money Spent: $98.57
Price/Game: $1.02
# of Games YTD: 429
Total Money Spent YTD: $274.65
Price/Game: $0.64
Game Recaps
May started with my playthrough of Inscryption, which was everything I hoped it would be. I had one session of Tales of Destiny with my friend too. We fought our way through the snowy forest, reached the first town, met up with new party members to explore a hidden temple, and were about to head to the next town when we called it for the day. The combat is taking a lot of getting used to with the CC (Chain Capacity) system. Instead of having a fixed TP pool to cast artes, you have a counter that cycles between your minimum and maximum CC (say 2-5) as you perform actions. A basic attack will use one CC, base artes use two CC, and stronger artes consume more. This encourages faster combat and lets you use artes much more regularly and apply pressure on enemies. It all sounds good in theory as I felt in Phantasia that I shouldn’t use artes at all as Cless since my friend played Arche and needed all the TP we had to cast spells. I tend to play games more defensively and slower paced though and this system actively discourages that. We’re still early in the game though and practicing our skills. I’m just worried about the pace of combat outstripping my friend’s ability to play it. Here’s hoping we find our groove!
Next on the list are a few smaller indie games that left Game Pass in May: Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo, Go Mecha Ball, and Crypt Custodian. I wasn’t planning on playing them so soon, but that’s the nature of games leaving the subscription service which forces me to reprioritize my upcoming games. Kulebra was a fantastic adventure game, maybe the best I’ve ever played in a genre I’m admittedly not too familiar with. Go Mecha Ball was an OK twin-stick roguelite, nothing too special. Crypt Custodian was a solid metroidvania, niggling navigation issues aside. It was mercifully easy compared to Nine Sols. I don’t know if I would be able to handle another game of that difficulty anytime soon. I played an idle game in the background at work called Universal Paperclips as well. Play might be a strong word as I only occasionally interacted with it, but there was an ending so I guess I'm counting it. And last but not least, I of course had to continue my Final Fantasy journey with V. I just got the airship and I think I'm about to fly up to a floating city to protect the earth crystal. As always, here are links to playlists of any let’s plays for games played or uploaded last month. Expedition 33 is finally done uploading! About time, I finished that game forever ago. I made the decision a while ago that I didn’t want to move around all my uploads whenever I start recording a new game because it was a huge hassle, so a lot of these aren’t public yet. More specifically, Final Fantasy V will be out June 16th, Inscryption June 19th, Tales of Destiny July 7th, Kulebra July 11th, Go Mecha Ball July 13th, and Crypt Custodian July 20th. I swear I am still slowly catching up with my upload schedule now that I’m not limiting myself to one hour per video, especially now that Expedition 33 is done.
Game Reviews
Inscryption
Inscryption is a roguelite deckbuilder with escape room elements and a whole meta-narrative filmed in live action about a content creator who finds the game itself on a floppy disk buried in the woods and records himself playing it. That’s as much of the story as I’m willing to give away as I believe it’s best experienced first-hand. Rest assured that it is a good story worth experiencing, even if the acting in the live action segments is somewhat cheesy. The escape room elements can mostly be ignored if that’s not your thing, although you do uncover fun bits of lore and some cards you can use. The meat of Inscryption is the deckbuilder, and it is probably the best deckbuilder I’ve ever played.
If you’ve played any roguelite deckbuilders, none of this is new information. You start with a small number of cards with various stats and abilities. The card will show you how much health it has, how much damage it does, the requirements needed to play it, and any special abilities it has which the game refers to as sigils. There are a large variety of sigils like making the card fly so you attack your opponent directly and automatically moving the card to an empty space to block a hit that would’ve hit you. You progress along a map that occasionally forks which allows you to decide if you want to collect new cards, modify existing cards, pick up items, craft totems which affect all cards of a certain type, and so on. The health and sacrifice systems are unique. Unlike many other deckbuilders, you don’t have a pool of health that stays between encounters. Instead, there is a balance scale off to the side that starts in the neutral position. The goal is to tip the scale to the opponent’s side by five notches to win. That means it’s possible to take out or be taken out by one powerful attack if you aren’t able to block it. A card can block the full brunt of an attack at least once no matter how much health it has left which allows you to throw out weak cards to block powerful attacks while you hope to draw a better card to counterattack.
Each turn, you have two piles of cards to pick from: your regular deck or squirrel cards. A squirrel is free to play, has no attack value, and one health. They can be used as a last ditch effort to block an attack as mentioned earlier, but their main purpose is to be placed and immediately sacrificed to play a more powerful card. Sacrifices come in the form of either bones or blood. Whenever a creature dies by any means, you get one bone token (or more if their sigil is a pile of bones). The bone tokens can be used at anytime to play a card that requires them. Blood on the other hand must come from living creatures that are actively on the field and can only be obtained by sacrificing them and immediately playing the card that needs the sacrifice. As expected, more powerful cards require greater sacrifices. There are four spaces you can play a card on, so the most powerful cards require four blood to play. Another interesting wrinkle is that while the opponent also has four spaces to play cards, they have another row where the place cards they want to play next. This lets you plan out how you want to tackle the next turn, and you can even affect these cards that aren’t technically in play yet. If you card damages an opponent card enough to kill it, any overflow damage can also target the card waiting to be played which allows you to take out both in one powerful swing. Another strategy I came across was seeing a powerful card being queued up behind a much weaker card. Instead of killing the weak card like I normally would, I could keep it in place to do chip damage to me while allow me to focus on other lanes to hopefully do more damage to them and keep their powerful card at bay. If you are defeated, you get to craft a new card by mixing and matching stats, sigils, and sacrifices from other cards which can lead to some extremely overpowered combinations. This is where the roguelite aspect comes in. As you can see, there’s a ton of strategy involved, as well as some luck of the draw and what cards you have in your deck.
While I maintain that this game is extremely good and everyone who likes deckbuilders should play it, it still isn’t perfect. As with any roguelike or roguelite, there are some runs where you just don’t get the cards you need and lose through no fault of your own. The optional Kaycee’s Mod, which is a pure roguelike challenge mode unlocked by beating the game, was way too difficult for me to beat even level one with the luck I was having. There was also no roguelite element to it, so I wasn’t getting more powerful over time and kept running into the same brick wall over and over. While I beat the main game in 15 hours, I spent another seven hours on Kaycee’s Mod just because I was having so much fun and that still wasn’t enough to beat it once. The most egregious negative that I have for this game though, and this is partially a sign of how good it is, is that the ending feels rushed. Without going into spoiler territory too much, the game hints that there are four opponents you must defeat to win the game. Each opponent has different mechanics introduced that added fun new ways to play. Most of the focus is on the first opponent, but a good amount of time is spent with the second as well. Then you fight the third and fourth opponents one time each and the game just ends. I almost felt like I played half the game the developers wanted to make before they ran out of time or money. The combat mechanics seemed completely fleshed out for these opponents too, you just spend so little time with them that it felt like a waste. I would love to see a sequel that either lets you fight them properly or introduces new enemies to face. Even though it felt like I played half a game, that half was very enjoyable and I look forward to Daniel Mullins’ next project.
Time to beat
(Main+Extras) - 14h:59m
Rating – 9/10
Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo
Kulebra is an adventure game about helping souls find peace so they can move on to what’s next. The game starts with you waking up in Limbo as a skeletal snake and immediately coming across a mysterious old lady tied to a rock who asks you to free her. After a super simple tutorial on inventory and exploration, you free her and the two of you walk down a long dark corridor as she explains how you’re a special soul and you need to help the other souls. When you enter a clearing and see the outside world for the first time, the old lady vanishes and you’re greeted by a friendly crow named…well, Krow…who lays out your basic objectives, provides a notebook guide, and explains that time slowly passes and certain events can only be completed at certain times of the day. You’re then free to explore, talk to people, and solve puzzles. I felt that this was a great introduction to the game. The bright colors as you exit the corridor and humorous dialog from Krow conveyed a lighthearted tone, while the rambling from the old lady just prior hinted at a darker mystery under the surface to unravel.
The gameplay is standard for anyone familiar with adventure games. You walk around environments picking up anything you can squeeze in your inventory, talking to NPCs to get hints of what to do next, and solving puzzles by using and combining the items in your inventory. This is normally where adventure games lose me because most of the puzzles in these types of games are extremely convoluted and impossible for me to solve without having a guide open the whole time. Thankfully, I didn’t have that problem in this game and almost everything was easy to figure out. I’m not sure if that will turn more hardcore adventure game fans away, but it went a long way to pull me in. When you solve the conflict in the first area, you unlock the second one, meet all the new characters and solve their conflicts, then unlock the third and final hub area. Along the way you can find hidden collectibles, solve hidden temple puzzles, and complete side quests by doing favors for optional NPCs.
Not everything is sunshine and rainbows in the world of Limbo. The puzzle selection is rather limited, and the gameplay doesn’t evolve much over the course of the game as a result. The boss battles at the end of each chapter are mostly just quizzes about what’s happened up to that point which was kinda lame. The number of areas to explore is rather limited. While there are five chapters to the game (plus an epilogue and conclusion which are somehow different things), there are only three major areas. The first area encompasses chapter one, the second area chapter two, and the third area chapter three. I assumed that the fourth chapter would lead me to a new area but nope, it was just the third area again just slightly different. Chapter 5 at least introduces what is essentially a haunted mansion at the end, but the large maze-like layout was frustrating to navigate. The mansion also exacerbated these issues by just recycling the puzzles from previous chapters, having multiple quiz boss battles, and making you navigate the entire mansion again while being chased by several monsters. As you can see, I had many gripes with the final area, and if the game had ended there, I may not have been as positive about it as I am.
Luckily, a large update titled Closure added several hours of content that I enjoyed. It introduced slightly harder puzzle challenges that while they were still mostly variations of puzzles in the base game, they provided enough mental stimulation to keep me engaged. More importantly though, it also wrapped up the fantastic story in a much more satisfying way. You finally get to the bottom of the darker mystery hinted at in the beginning. More story threads are tied up, although perhaps in a lengthier way than what I felt was necessary (looking at you Plaza hotel). Characters you’ve grown close to are set up to continue their work helping people in the world of Limbo. I didn’t touch on the story too much, but that’s because I feel it’s best experienced first-hand. It was my favorite part of the game and what pulled me through. There are plenty of laughs and more than a fair share of tearjerker moments. I think the Pixar movie Coco is the closest comparison to Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo. If you enjoyed the themes in that movie, I think you will enjoy this game too. Just make sure to stick with it through the Closure Edition content to see the true ending!
Time to beat
(Completionist) - 15h:3m
Rating – 8/10
Go Mecha Ball
Go Mecha Ball is a twin-stick shooter roguelite. It starts with a short motion comic showing anthropomorphized adolescent cats playing when they’re interrupted by a giant portal opening and robots spilling out to wreak havoc. The cats create mechsuits and fly through the portal to take out the robots and save their world. After this intro, there is no more story in the game so you can safely ignore all of that. If you’re looking for any kind of narrative thread to pull on, you won’t find it here. However, if you’re looking for fast-paced, pinball inspired shooting action, read on.
The structure of the game is simple. There are four worlds with a boss fight at the end of each. Each world is divided into three stages, and each stage has three waves of enemies you must defeat to progress. There are four classes available, although you only start with the first one unlocked. Each class has slightly different stats and a starting weapon. I only played with the first class so can’t comment on the others, although the weapons seem to be the most important thing and every class can equip any weapon. The two ways of attacking enemies are either by shooting them (duh) with one of the two weapons you can have equipped or by ramming into them while in ball form. This is the one thing about this game that I felt was unique. You are heavily encouraged to make use of the environment and your abilities to zoom around the map and slam into enemies to do damage or knock them off the map. Even if you completely run out of ammo, you still have a way of doing damage. The movement is the one thing I felt that this game absolutely nailed. Zooming around the map slamming into bad guys always felt satisfying, and I never experienced any slowdown no matter how fast I was moving or how many enemies and projectiles were on screen.
Anyone who knows roguelites will be familiar with the gameplay loop. After each stage, you can pick one of three powerups like more collision damage or getting a special ability. Before every boss, you stop by a shop to spend coins you’ve collected to buy up to three randomized items like a health refill or gun. You can also choose to put extra money into unlocking another character. After that, you fight the boss and move on to the next world. If you lose a run, you can spend a different currency at gacha machines to unlock more guns, abilities, or powerups to find in your next run. Unfortunately, that’s the extent of the game as it is extremely basic outside the movement. All the runs felt the same since the world order is unchanged, levels felt samey, and you only encountered the same four bosses in the same order every time. Most abilities I came across didn’t seem super useful, and only the starting machine guns felt like viable weapons. I never unlocked anything that felt like a gamechanger and ended up beating the same on my third or fourth attempt. I spent the currency I accumulated afterwards to unlock more stuff at the gacha machines but none of it felt like something that would provide a fundamentally different experience. There is an option to increase the difficulty but after the first run, I didn’t feel the need to continue. I would only recommend this on a deep sale if the pinball movement sounds appealing to you, otherwise there are way better roguelikes/roguelites out there to sink your teeth into. There is not a lot of depth here.
Time to beat
(Main) - 3h:1m
Rating – 6.5/10
Crypt Custodian
Crypt Custodian is a metroidvania where you play as Pluto, a cat who has just died and sent to what is essentially the pearly gates to decide his fate. Kendra, the frog in charge, appears receptive to letting Pluto into the fabled Palace until she accuses him of smashing her statues on his way there. She then sentences him to be a janitor cleaning up garbage outside the Palace forever. From the moment you enter the Inn and speak to the people inside, you suspect that maybe Kendra is hiding something. You meet up with ten other ghostly animal friends throughout your journey and conspire to break into the Palace and steal the Crystal Mirror, an artifact that lets your soul travel back to Earth to feel the presence of those you left behind. That’s basically the entire story, there’s not really much intrigue here and the story is presented in a funny, simple, and lighthearted way despite the heavy focus on death.
Gameplay is your standard metroidvania fare. There is a large, interconnected world map you can freely traverse with some areas gated off until you unlock certain abilities. You fight enemies with your trusty broom while making use of a slam attack, a special ability, jumping, and dashing. Defeating enemies or cleaning garbage provides currency which you can use to buy powerups or hints to collectibles and the next major story beat. Combat is fairly simple due to the limited moveset; there isn’t even a charged attack, and you can only equip one ability at a time. Despite some light bullet hell moments, especially in the boss fights, the ability to dash or jump over every attack meant it was simply a matter of learning patterns and wailing on them until they die. There’s always a checkpoint right before a boss too so you can try again quickly without the pain of having to get back. I remember the first time I died; I checked the map to find my death marker which wasn’t there and my first thought was “Wow, that’s brutal. Now I have to try to remember where I died so I can get my currency back.” I quickly found out though that you don’t lose anything on death and thus it has no consequences. This was a relief to me, and a realization that perhaps I’ve been playing too many soulslikes lately and forgot how normal action games used to operate. I don’t really view any of this as a negative per se, although hardcore players probably won’t find enough challenge here to keep them engaged.
My biggest complaint about this game is the navigation. There’s a lot of little things about using the map that bothered me. The world map has two levels of detail: a zoomed out view that removes most details and shows every room as a plain rectangle and a more zoomed in view that shows everything as it actually is. There’s also an optional minimap you can enable (which I did) that always sits at the corner of the screen and shows a small section of the zoomed out view from the main map. In the zoomed out view, the exits to other rooms are shown, but they aren’t always to scale with the actual room layout. For example, it might show an exit in the bottom center of the screen when it’s actually more to the left. This is exacerbated on the minimap by your player icon not always lining up with where you are in the room, which made it almost useless. Additionally, there’s not enough detail on the zoomed out map in my opinion. Nothing is labeled, although you can hover over the fast travel points to get the name of the area they’re in. The areas are color coded but there’s no legend anywhere so you kind of just have to memorize where everything is to get around. In the zoomed in view, while the accurate room layouts are shown, that’s the only new detail you get from it. Looking for areas you haven’t been to yet, NPCs you’ve met, special locations, or items are nowhere to be found. On top of that, when you’re in the zoomed in view, panning around is extremely slow and there’s no diagram of the zoomed out map to show where you are in relation to anything else. There are up to 50 markers with a few different shapes you can pick from to mark important points on the map, but you can’t see them if they’re in an area you haven’t been to yet and there’s no way to label them. If you die, you aren’t automatically sent to the last shrine you visited. I found that it would send me to the one before that so I would always have to open the map and teleport to the place I was just at manually. Lastly, if you pan to an area on the map you want to go to in one view and then switch to the other view, the cursor resets to your current location for no reason. These are all little things I feel should have been caught in testing and patched out, but either these problems are unique to me or nobody found them annoying enough to address.
I know I went on a huge rant in the last paragraph, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy my time with Crypt Custodian. Despite the simple story, lack of serious challenge, and annoying navigation, it’s still a solid metroidvania. The combat is enjoyable, the characters all have unique personalities, and I was interested enough in the elusive Palace to press on. If you’re in the mood for a metroidvania and don’t want your brain or reflexes tested too much, I can recommend this one. And if you finish this and want to graduate to a more sophisticated metroidvania with challenging combat, better quality control, higher production values, and a less predictable, mature story while still playing as an anthropomorphic cat, check out Nine Sols. Kinda weird that both games came out within three months of each other, right?
Time to beat
(Completionist) - 12h:58m
Rating – 8/10
Universal Paperclips
I wasn't planning on adding this one to my completions as I mostly had it running in the background at work. I don't have much to say about this, it's an idle game that runs in your browser about making and selling paperclips as fast as possible. New mechanics are introduced as the game progresses but they all basically boil down to new ways to make money and are pretty hands-off. There is a twist right when you think the game is over that takes the game in a new direction that's kinda cool. The ending was neat, but a couple late-game mechanics leading there were confusing and I had to look up a guide to finish it. Overall, an OK way to waste time while you're doing other stuff.
Time to beat
(Main) - ???
Rating – 5.5/10
Stats
No huge heavy-hitters on the long game front last month. Inscryption just eked into the top five most played of the year at 22 hours. I suspect Final Fantasy V will shoot into the top three by the time I’m done with it, I think it’s a pretty long game. You can see the insane jump in spending last month, with a modest jump in games acquired to go with it. The first half of the month especially had a lot of bundles I didn’t want to pass up as mentioned earlier. Who knows if the summer will slow down but probably not? I imagine there will be a few bundles launched to coincide with Summer Game Fest and all the new announcements coming out of that. My gametime took a dip after I unexpectedly didn’t play anything over Memorial Day weekend. Too busy with other stuff, I guess. Maybe summer will give me some time to get more gaming in.
Conclusion/Upcoming
I didn’t think this update would be so long, but my Word document is 11 pages. That’s crazy! It must be all the YouTube links and game reviews. If only I dedicated the time spent on those things to playing more games I might actually make some progress.
In other news, I’m looking forward to Summer Game Fest this week, although I find it difficult to be excited for new games when I know it’ll be years before I buy any of them while I wait for sales and many more years after that to play them due to the size of my backlog. I’ve been feeling this way for a while now and wasn’t sure how to bring it up. There are so many good games coming out this year that I want to play (Pragmata and 007: First Light being recent examples) but I haven’t even added them to my wishlist because I’m getting to the point where I don’t know if I’ll ever get to them. Something’s gotta give at some point, and I’m guessing my content creation will be on the chopping block. Still thinking about it though, nothing is set in stone yet.
For June, my plan is to finish Final Fantasy V and start the next game in the series (which won’t be VI!) I’ll also keep an eye on the games leaving Game Pass to see if there are other unexpected games I need to move to the top of my upcoming games list. I didn’t expect to play Inscryption, Kulebra, and Crypt Custodian so soon but I’m glad I did because they were all great games. Inscryption is even in my #1 spot for the year so far! Will it be dethroned? I guess we’ll all find out. Thanks for reading!
Backlog total: 4,271 (+120)
