The worst thing has happened! Despite saying for months that Little Rocket Lab was at the top of my to play list, Microsoft removed it from Game Pass at the end of the month. They only give two weeks’ notice for game removals and the game is over 40 hours long, so I knew I wouldn’t be able to get to it in time and made the sad decision to remove it from my list entirely. It kinda sucks because I was looking forward to it and it has great reviews. I even made a thumbnail and everything! Oh well, it was bound to happen eventually. At least I was able to play another couple of games in time that also left the service.
Game Acquisitions
Another month of game bundle purchases and giveaways. I’ve been averaging roughly one AAA game’s worth of spending per month but getting dozens of games in return which is a pretty sweet deal. Do I need all these games? Absolutely not, but I almost feel like I can justify it since other members of my Steam family have access to them too. I also had a couple rare single game purchases with Beat Saber and Persona 3 Reload. They have both been on my wishlist for a while and finally got worthwhile discounts (that I used Steam wallet funds for so nothing out of pocket). I was expecting Persona 3 to hit Humble Choice by now, but it hasn’t and I got impatient. If it does show up for October, I’ll still be in the return window so no big deal. That’s probably the game I’m looking forward to the most from this list, but I’m excited for Dread Delusion, MiSide, and Smash it Wild as well among others. There’s a lot of good games here!
# of Games: 72
Total Money Spent: $72.69
Price/Game: $1.01
# of Games YTD: 745
Total Money Spent YTD: $547.17
Price/Game: $0.73
Game Recaps
I managed to play five games in September, although I still didn’t get as much playtime as I did the last couple months. This is partially due to less playing time but also because I made the rare decision to 100% a game. This is something I don’t normally do due to difficulty and general lack of enthusiasm for a game, but Absolum really sucked me in for a couple weeks there. Atomfall and Sopa were the other games I mentioned leaving Game Pass, so I decided to rush through them by comparison. Lastly, my friend and I finally finished the first story arc in our co-op Tales of Destiny playthrough after 25ish hours. There was basically a whole anime episode that played after beating Greybum which presented like the end to the game with all the party members leaving one by one, but I knew we didn’t have nearly enough hours to be done. Sure enough, they teased the next arc and started off with just the main character Stahn. I’m curious to see how the party gets back together so we can be reacquainted with the people we’ve gotten used to playing with. I need my healer back! Anyway, check out all the let’s plays either released or recorded last month. After almost a year of uploads, my playthrough of Metaphor: ReFantazio has finally released in full! With that, I’ve also decided to increase my uploads to every other day instead of every third to get them out a little faster. Even with the increased number of uploads, Absolum won’t be out until November 25th, Atomfall on December 25th, and Sopa on January 8th. Maybe I’ll temporarily go back to daily uploads to catch up a little bit, but it is nice to have a buffer in case I go a few days without playing anything.
Game Reviews
Absolum
Absolum is an interesting mashup of beat-em-ups and roguelites. I’m not usually a fan of the beat-em-up genre as I find them a bit too shallow and button-mashy, but Absolum circumvents this with the roguelite progression system, world, story, and side quests. In typical roguelite fashion, even when I failed a run and had to start over, I still felt that I made meaningful progress in the form of upgrades, story progression, and new rituals. The upgrades came at a regular pace throughout my playtime until I rolled credits the first time, but if you decide to continue your playthrough to wrap up side quests or take on the true final boss, you’ll find that they quickly dry up. That means your motivation to continue must rely on the gameplay loop and side stories, and luckily those were enough for me to keep going.
The game starts off at a hub area that introduces you to a couple side characters, a literal upgrade tree, a training dummy to practice your moves, and two of the four playable characters to pick from with their own movesets (you find the other two as part of the main quest). You pick which character you want to use and one of their special abilities and start your run. The first thing you encounter is a choice of one of the many rituals in the game that you’ve unlocked so far. These rituals are the main way to craft your build and come from one of eight families such as fire, water, necromancy, and chaos. They usually take the form of small passive abilities like creating a burning trail behind you when you dash or freezing enemies temporarily with critical hits. On their own, they don’t change the game much, but when you start combining them and leveling them up, you can create some insane builds. Even 20+ hours in, I was still surprised at how different each run could feel depending on what rituals I picked.
The world map shows all the path choices you can make. There are four distinct areas in the game of which you’ll encounter three in any given run. The first area has several branching paths, the second area has a couple, and the final area is a sort of hub area with a few rooms you can visit before fighting your way through a gauntlet of enemies in a hallway to reach the final boss. There are a few bosses along the way that you fight depending on the path you choose, including some secret bosses tied to side quests. Everything is marked on the map to make it easier to determine which path to take depending on your goal for that run, although some quests have multiple steps that take multiple runs and some luck which was a bit frustrating. Even so, discovering every area and completing every quest was a great motivator for me to play just one more run, and the ritual combinations kept the beat-em-up combat fresh as well. I would say that even if you aren’t a beat-em-up fan, I would still give this game a shot. Even with the repetition that started to set in after I discovered every area and unlocked every ritual and upgrade, the story, characters, and build variety more than made up for it and was enough for me to 100% the game. This is not normally something I go for which I think speaks to the quality of the experience.
Time to beat (Completionist) - 32h:38m
Rating – 8.5/10
Atomfall
Atomfall is what I imagine you’d get if S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Fallout had a weird little British baby. That’s certainly the weirdest intro to a game review I’ve made, but I think it fits in this case. You start the game being woken up in a mysterious underground facility by a bleeding man in a hazmat suit and quickly introduced to the dialog, inventory, and crafting systems. After searching through the starting area picking up random stuff to craft a bandage to stop the guy from bleeding out, you leave the first area and come across the first enemy in the game. You can choose to fight him, but an indicator shows he is simply wary of you instead of outright hostile and warns you to stay away. This shows that you can resolve encounters in a variety of ways and not everything has to end in a shootout. After emerging from the underground facility, you get your glimpse of the semi-open world and are greeted by a mysterious voice in a phone booth spouting nonsense that you don’t quite understand yet. A little way down you come across a couple rundown buildings and another friendly NPC who introduces you to the world, dangles a couple story threads to follow, and gives you a map to aid in exploring and sends you on your way.
I think this was an effective way to introduce the player to Atomfall. You now have all the major gameplay systems, a world to explore, and threads to follow. Threads are the Atomfall’s version of quests. Notably, with the default difficulty, these threads do not explicitly tell you where to go or mark anything on your map. Instead, you’re meant to use context clues to find your way. This encourages engaging your critical thinking skills as well as providing an opportunity to meander and scavenge while exploring anything that looks interesting. I played this way for the first few hours but realized after a while I was lost on where to go and ran back and forth across the first couple of areas in a desperate attempt to move the story forward. Eventually, I lowered the exploration difficulty which added waypoints to the map so I could progress.
I have mixed feelings about this game. I was initially impressed by the graphics, gunplay, and narrative hooks I was presented with. There were a couple areas I genuinely had fun exploring and figuring out how to effectively take out the enemies there. The amount of backtracking, repetitive combat encounters, shallow gameplay loop, and confusing progression started to wear on me after a while, however. There is a skill tree with some skills hidden until you read books about them, but the skills didn’t seem to make much of a difference. There’s a crafting system, but I found myself only ever having to craft bandages and nothing else. There are different weapon tiers ranging from rusty to pristine, but a well-placed headshot would kill most enemies with any weapon, so the weapon variety didn’t seem to matter. Stealth is present but basically worthless because enemies will spot you almost instantly with no warning and you can’t sneak up on the harder enemies to take them out silently at all. There’s nothing inherently bad about Atomfall, but nothing that really stands out either. I still think it’s worth a playthrough if you enjoy post-apocalyptic FPS games with an emphasis on exploration and an intriguing sci-fi hook. Just don’t expect to be blown away.
Time to beat (Main+Sides) - 17h:22m
Rating – 7/10
SOPA: Tale of the Stolen Potato
SOPA is a Latin-inspired 3D point-and-click adventure game about a boy helping his grandmother make soup. She asks him to fetch a potato from their pantry, but upon entering, the potato bag is stolen by a magical talking frog, and the boy is teleported to a magical world and sent on a wild goose chase to get it back. Gameplay is typical for the genre: you explore the environments talking to people, pick up seemingly random objects to put in your inventory, and using or combining those items to solve various puzzles to progress. Anybody who has played an adventure game knows what to expect here.
Admittedly, I am not a fan of point-and-click adventure games. Oftentimes the puzzle solutions will be needlessly obtuse, and I have to resort to a guide just to get through them. This happened to me a couple times in my short playthrough, but overall, the puzzles seemed to be a little more straightforward. That being said, everything about this game is a bit of a mess. The graphics are dated and there was some egregious pop-in. The animations seem limited and stilted. The camera is fixed and sometimes would get stuck in a place where you couldn’t see where you were going. The environments are large enough that the constant walking back and forth grew tiresome. Voice acting is reduced to Simlish that sounds vaguely Spanish with too many repeated sounds which made it feel haphazardly put together (except Jellyman, he’s great). And just when you think you’ve beaten the game after acquiring the titular potato, you’re sent back to the first area again to solve even more puzzles for some reason. It’s like the developers ran out of ideas but really tried to stretch the runtime past the Steam refund window.
The only positive I can really give this game is that a lot of the writing is pretty funny. I hate to give this game a negative review because it’s clearly a labor of love and spotlights South American culture, but there’s just too many rough edges for me to recommend. I see that this is StudioBando’s first paid release after coming out with a free mobile game a few years ago. I can only hope that they continue to improve their craft and release better and better games in the future. The bones of a good game are here; I think the developer may just need some more experience under their belt to pull it off.
Time to beat (Main) - 2h:56m
Rating – 5.5/10
Stats
Absolum snuck its way into my top 10 most played games of the year at #7. It didn’t seem like I played it that long, which I think goes to show how much I enjoyed it. Final Fantasy still dominates, taking half of the top 10 slots. Spending continues to be elevated, and there’s at least one bundle already out that I plan on buying at Fanatical after October’s Humble Choice is revealed. I admit it is satisfying seeing how close the green spending line is to the orange bar to indicate $1 per game purchase. You can see September is now my third straight decline in gametime and third lowest amount of gametime for the year. I’m not exactly sure what’s causing this, but I hope I can bring it back up.
Conclusion/Upcoming
September ended up being a bit of a ho-hum month unfortunately. Absolum was the exception though, that game was fantastic. It’s unfortunate that I never got to play Little Rocket Lab, it looked charming. I’ll be continuing down the Game Pass catalog regardless for October. Assuming no other games are announced as coming to or leaving the service that I care about, the next game on my list is BALL x PIT. I’ve heard great things about it, and it looks super fun. Afterwards, I’m going to tackle Crime Scene Cleaner. I admit I’m surprised by how positive the reviews are for this game. Maybe it’ll end up being a sleeper hit. If I still have time left over, I’m going to try out Starsand Island. It’s a recently released anime life/farming sim that looks like a nice cozy game, but recent Steam reviews complain about broken early access promises and undisclosed AI use. I haven’t been following development on the game so I’m curious to go in blind and see for myself. Anyway, that’s going to do it for me this month. Thank you all for reading!
Backlog total: 4,700 (+88)
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