It’s always a pain to finish a game during the Backlog Burner event and to know that your backlog has not in fact shrunk one bit, because earlier this year Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector released, and immediately after finishing the first one I went to Steam and bought it. I’m about to be a bit harsh on Citizen Sleeper in this review, and what I want to be clear about right up front is that I think this game, a management sim-meets-Disco Elyisum style RPG, where you explore a space station and try to build a life there, is very good. The worst that can be said about it is that it’s derivative and poorly paced and painfully light – and I will be saying all that. But I don’t want the strengths of this game to get lost in the shuffle, so let’s start with those.

Citizen Sleeper is, mechanically, very more-ish. Fundamentally, the game plays like this: at the start of the day, you roll a pool of one to five six sided dice, depending on your current health. You then spend those dice around the halo-shaped space station megastructure The Eye, doing odd jobs or progressing questlines or hacking – choosing which tasks should get the high rolls, and which ones should get the low rolls. By completing jobs, you unlock conversation scenes that will progress one of several sidestories and provide roleplaying opportunities. Often, key jobs and quests will come with a time limit, giving you only a set number of days to complete them, or forcing you to wait a set number of days to progress them. Each day is short, lasting only a few minutes – I completed the game in ninety in-game days and nine real-world hours – and you’ll often have multiple irons on the fire, multiple timers running. My thoguht process often went something like, "well, in three days, the ship dealing scrap will arrive, so I can craft a shipmind for X quest, but in four days, I have to pay this guy’s bar tab, so I should do some jobs in the meantime, and in this job, I have to decide whether to spend my dice on actually doing work, or on searching for clues about the underlying mystery before I get fired."

And at the end of the day, you think, well, it’s just a couple more days until Y happens, so I should keep playing until then, and it’s always just a couple more days to get something big done, with multiple overlapping timers, so the game is very difficult to put down. I played Citizen Sleeper in almost a single sitting, only breaking to eat and to clean the bathroom, and I didn’t even intend to – you know, nine hour game – but the mechanics were so propulsive that I just couldn’t stop. It helps that the story is pretty well-written, too. On The Eye you meet a diverse, colorful cast of characters belonging to a homogeneously grimy group of factions: corporations, gangs, corrupt unions. And the writing isn’t unusually beautiful, the dialogue isn’t unusually believable, but it isn’t trying to be. This is a competently written game that knows exactly what it is; that is at its best when telling stories about a cast that’s like, thirty percent male, thirty percent female, and thirty percent NB, where politics serve as an ever present subtext, where there are no easy choices or everybody wins scenarios. Which is most of the time. It’s a pity, then, that I’ve read this story before.

Citizen Sleeper has an achievement called A LONG JOURNEY TO A SMALL UNKNOWN PLANET. This is a reference to Becky Chambers’s novel The Long Way to A Small, Angry Planet, and, alongside Disco Elysium, that book is clearly Citizen Sleeper’s biggest reference point. If you’ve read Chambers’s novels, you’ll immediately recognize in Citizen Sleeper both direct references and an extremely strong tonal and structural resemblance. Circumstantially, both stories seem rather bleak, but by focusing on relatively hopeful and empathetic stories of community and solidarity, both spacefaring something-punk worlds ultimately feel quite cozy and, in low moments, even a little weightless. Both stories largely lack a main plot, instead taking on an episodic narrative structure comprised of largely disconnected character-driven stories. In Citizen Sleeper, you play as a robot consciousness with no legal rights; the way that story is handled will strongly remind you of The Long Way’s sequels. In some respects, Citizen Sleeper actually surpasses Chambers’s book. Because its episodes progress on these overlapping timers, they feel muddled together, creating a greater sense of a more textured, cohesive world, where all the characters are living their lives in parallel, so that even if their paths don't really cross, at least they're not arbitrarily disappearing from the narrative whenever an episode doesn't need them. But in most ways, Citizen Sleeper is worse than the novel that so clearly inspired it, with weaker prose and dialogue, and much worse pacing, especially towards the end (unfortunately, the game overstays its welcome). What’s really missing here, I think, is intertextuality. Citizen Sleeper owes a great debt to the Chambers's Wayfarers series and to Disco Elysium, but it also fails to really say or do much of anything that they haven’t. It doesn’t challenge them, or disagree with them, or add to the conversation those texts are having, except to say, “mhm, definitely!” Its politics are obvious if you’ve ever played, like, the modal indie game before. Its writing is much better than the average game, but weaker than the average novel. It entirely lacks a main plot, meaning that this is a game that’s basically only side-stories, a serious flaw when even Disco had its murder investigation and The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet had its titular journey. The game really feels like a freshman effort, the bright-eyed attempt of a young team to emulate what they loved about their favorite art, and not going far enough to equal, much less surpass, their influences.

But what the hell, I teared up twice to the end of side quests in Citizen Sleeper. The bright-eyed young team might not do much that’s new, but they do enough that’s interesting, vulnerable, and human to make the game well worth your time. There are even a couple neat bits of commentary hidden in there. Like, with all of the different jobs you’ll be doing in a single day, the game can feel pretty gig-economy-y. In one day, I’ve tended bar for Tala, I’ve scrapped a ship for the union, and I’ve grown mushrooms for the commune. And this is actually built into the world, with a scene that depicts the difficulty characters have getting permanent work assignments, forced in the meantime have to take a ticket, wait in line, and hope their number gets called for scrapper work or whatever. There are a couple of neat ways the simple mechanics reinforce the world like that. A lot of extraneous little details that make The Eye feel more real, alive, and cohesively thought-out, with a strong sense of place. There are lots of ostensibly redundant restaurants or apartments with different meals and prices tailored for the class of the usual clientele. There are lots of different completely optional jobs, with different risks and pay rates. There’s a cat that only appears in one scene, but you can still feed it every day (in the futile hope it might one day turn up again). The Eye possesses such a strong sense of place, that it even weakened certain decisions. When two out of three main “endings” – the questlines that will roll credits; yes, you can do all three of them – involved the choice of whether to leave The Eye or set out for somewhere unknown, the choice was trivially easy for me. This place feels like home – why would my character, on the run all their life, leave it for another unknown? It’s also cool that you often have the option in dialogue to just… not say anything. I probably clicked “Stay silent” in my playthrough more than every other dialogue option combined, which allowed me to roleplay a type of character that you can’t usually get in RPGs – one I’m actually fairly similar to in real life, the more reserved, introverted type – and the writing very naturally accommodates this choice. So the game is at a baseline just well made, and it’s also not devoid of its own little charms.

Like I said, though, Citizen Sleeper really outstays its welcome. Its late game quests are easy to complete with the abundance of cash and skill points you’ll have, but have long timers between stages, meaning you’ll be spending a lot of days with not much of anything to spend your dice on and lots of time to grow tired of the game, only drawn forward by the tediously ticking timers and the nearly empty questlog. What sucks is that you know there’s no grand climax waiting for you at the end, just another (probably impactful) end to a sidequest that nevertheless won’t tie into a bigger picture or meaningfully develop a larger theme. So you’re just growing mushrooms for ingame day after day, looking forward with dread to the three post-launch endgame “episodes” that promise to be more of the same, for yet more hours.

Unfortunately, the episodes don’t make a strong early impression. By the late game, with nearly every skill unlocked, I found it trivially easy to complete all their stages, all their challenges, without ever being anywhere near a zugzwang, without ever having to think about how to spend my dice. And the writing is at its most overtly political, as you're challenged with handling a refugee crisis; here, again, Citizen Sleeper still says nothing revolutionary, and the more explicitly its characters talk about their political opinions, the less believable and the more clunky they sound. This only gets worse in the second episode when it becomes clear that the refugees in the flotilla, and the people on The Eye keeping them in stasis due to political and social anxieties, will have to join hands and work together to avert a natural disaster; an eye-rolling cliche; a painfully easy resolution to a problem that often, in the ral world, is deeply intractable and unjust. And once again, the final choice will be about whether to leave The Eye with the refugees, or stay on, with its tapestry of flawed people and flawed organizations. A choice I’ve made twice before, which will be no more interesting the third time.

I’ve been reading a couple books lately featuring leads who desperately want to go home. These are Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel Trilogy (don’t look it up, lest you think less of me), and China Mieville’s The Scar. These protagonists, Phedre and Bellis, they have experienced firsthand the cruelty and corruption of the imperial cities they grew up in, and yet, they are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to get back to their homes, to protect them, not out of nationalism, but out of some aching, unnameable desire. Were I a few years younger, I wouldn’t have understood this feeling, but I think I get it now. As a kid, my family spend a lot of time – years, consecutively, always in the process of moving. When we finally settled, I was afraid that if my family found out about my identity, they would throw me away. As a young adult, I moved from the midwest to Texas back to the midwest back to Texas to a different city in Texas, uprooted by work and COVID and depression and transition. And I never felt like I had a home. Just, a lot of places I’d lived for a while. Then, three years ago, I moved with the ladies to Seattle, and suddenly, that was that. Suddenly I understood what it means to love a place so much you can never leave it. Suddenly I knew what it was like to be home.

For me, if Citizen Sleeper has an emotional core, more than the vague and predictable explorations of politics, personhood and identity it contains, it’s that story of finding a community and making a home for yourself that resonated with me along all its disconnected threads. And even if it’s frustratingly predictable and a little contrived and contains so many dropped commas that I wonder whether it was proofread, that third and final episode would, at least, be a nice bookend to the experience.

So, I settled in to play it, and was proven delightfully wrong about just about everything.

In the third and final post-launch episode to Citizen Sleeper, finally, all of the stories that you thought were finished, all the characters who never interacted and sometimes felt like they existed in separate worlds from one another finally come together to deal with the natural disaster threatening The Eye and the refugees. In a climax that feels so organic that I’d almost believe that it was planned, every major dangling thread, much of the worldbuilding, many plots that seemed totally disconnected all converge into an elegant and satisfying solution to the crisis. The cat even shows up again. And, breaking my heart, many of the citizens of The Eye, worried about whether this tenuous solution you devise will work, still say goodbye, and leave with the refugee flotilla for a new and uncertain future. If it’s a little slapdash as a climax, it still ultimately ties together all of Citizen Sleeper’s mysteries and provides a satisfying and gut wrenching goodbye to its world. And finally, the game also dares to say something a little bit new. It portrays The Eye as a society with no history, only a fledgling culture, and therefore no strong bonds between its people. They are in danger of being washed away by the tide of flux, yes, but also by the corporate structure vying for control of the system, by the internal conflicts in the station. Meanwhile the refugees retain a powerful relationship to their culture and history; are at once imprisoned and guided by it. Thus, saving the Eye and the refugees is not just about stopping the “natural disaster.” It’s about helping them shoulder the weight of their patchwork histories, and bear that weight forward into the boundless future. For the Eye, to create their own stories, their own identities, separate from the traumas that have defined them. For the refugees, to be able to move on without breaking their neck from craning it backward. Work that cannot be done in the space of the game, but hangs heavy over the ending, as I, predictably, choose to stay on The Eye and face the coming disaster with all those who remain.

For the first time in the game, the camera pans out, capturing the whole Eye in one single shot. The dialogue box promises crises, disasters, and tensions to come. Throughout the game, I’ve seen the corruption within this place and without: the people who want to bend it to their own ends; the people who hate what it represents, and want to destroy it. I’ve watched as normal, innocent people struggle against its inequalities, trying their best to find a sense of community and stability within it all the same. I’ve watched people leave, and felt sorrow at how the city will miss them, and hope that they’ll find what they’re looking for. But this place is my home. I never once thought about leaving it.

This was a really interesting game because it is, ostensibly, a blend of two genres I love: Metroidvania, Soulslike – with three I don’t care for: platformer, puzzler, rhythm game. Metro Gravity is like if Hi-Fi Rush (a game I DNFed) met Mario Galaxy (my favourite childhood game) met Manifold Garden (another game I DNFed), tied together into a 3D Metroidvania. The idea is that you’re a (ludicrously caked up) witch who can control gravity, exploring a strange dream world where characters come to – deal with their trauma? Purge their guilt over past mistakes? I don’t know, it’s a vague, impressionistic Soulslike story, though at least a pretty tidy one. So I won’t speak too much on the writing – I felt the game’s tone was a little light and whimsical for the tricky themes it tried to explore, but it’s really hard to say whether that’s an actual flaw, with how little story there is by volume. What I will say is that every other element of this weird genre mishmash ultimately really works, and I had a lot of fun with the game, even if it made my head hurt.

Because you can walk on walls and ceilings (and every surface, actually), the opening to this game is really confusing, disorienting, and exhausting. At the beginning, I could only play Metro Gravity in thirty minute bursts without getting a serious headache, and I found it impossible to build a conceptual map of the space in my head, like I usually do with Metroidvanias. But eventually, you do adjust, or I did, and the spaces started to make a lot more sense, link together more cohesively, and not make my brain leak out of my ears. That said, were it not for the fact that this is the only “M” game on my backlog, and part of the easiest Bingo on my card, I almost certainly would have DNFed just from how rough the beginning was.

Once I adjusted though, and unlocked the grappling hook, moving around the levels was a genuine pleasure. The fact that every wall might have a door in it, but so might the ceiling and the floor, adds a level of depth to exploration that I wasn’t expecting, and the game makes good use of what I’ll call “falling puzzles” where the best way to traverse a room is to position yourself and align gravity so that it will make you fall towards your destination. These platforming challenges aren’t the only puzzles to be solved, of course. There are also electricity puzzles, laser puzzles, temperature puzzles, and block-and-button puzzles. Structurally, the game works like this: you find an area. In that area is a hub, with three or four chains or beams of light or wires leading off into nearby rooms. In each room is a puzzle or a battle; do the challenge, activate the power source or whatever, and once you’ve done all of them, the hub will open up or move aside or shine down to reveal a new area, or a boss door. This structure is, it must be said, extremely repetitive, but the areas and the puzzle mechanics are varied enough to keep things interesting, making good use of your unlocked abilities and offering a satisfying difficulty progression. The same cannot be said for the combat.

Metro Gravity has rhythm game combat, in a sense. It’s not that you have to attack or dodge on beat to succeed; it’s that, as I understand it, your inputs are kind of buffered and the moves don’t come out until the next beat in the music, so ultimately you’re sort of forced to be attacking and defending in rhythm with the enemy. Unfortunately, most enemies are just big health pools with one or two clearly telegraphed attacks that demand either a parry, dodge or jump in response; most enemies in the game, aside from bosses, feel more or less the same to fight, and it gets old by the end, so that’s a shame. The real standouts of the combat are those boss fights: there are five of them, by my count, and they’re all fantastic set pieces – really challenging attack sequences, set to great music, with the boss dragging you through several different locations, each one playing host to a new phase with a new attack pattern. These boss fights do a really good job of conveying the boss’s character – what they did that made them need to come to this virtual therapy world – without saying a word. It’s a bit unfortunate, though, that the boss fights are true rhythm game sequences; your attacks literally do nothing to them, except to increase your score and combo – until the song ends, whereupon the boss becomes a flaccid punching bag for you to finish off. It would, perhaps, be too much to ask for these fights to be actual fights, to have the music hold and loop until you did enough damage to progress to the next phase. That change would probably make the music much harder to compose, and make the boss fights feel less like a dance. But there’s a bit of a sense of a lack of agency with the boss fights that I wish the game did more to alleviate. The later boss fights do get a bit better by allowing you to, say, climb a snake in a big platforming section to continue the battle, which is what I’m looking for, but it’s still not quite enough.

It’s rare for me to actually enjoy the puzzles in a puzzle game – I usually find them either trivially easy or impossibly difficult, with no in between; it’s like, either I solve a puzzle very quickly, or I get bad tunnel vision and never solve it at all. But I actually found this game to be an exception, or maybe just I sign I’ve gotten out of that cognitive rut. There were a lot of puzzles that I kind of had to muddle through because the game doesn’t quite explain its gravity mechanics as well as it should – mainly, that when you change the gravitational direction of an object, it keeps that direction permanently, or until you change it again – but also, more than a few times where I had that satisfying “aha!” moment where the solution just clicked. It helps that this is a pretty obscure (read: underrated) game, and doesn’t really have any guides available for the tough puzzles – and at some points, believe me, I looked. So although I got stuck a couple times, and even thought about writing that I thought about quitting, I had a pretty enjoyable time pushing through and figuring things out. That said, I’m not going to fully 100% complete this game. Some of the optional puzzles make my head hurt just looking at them.

Metro Gravity is a really weird, niche game. It’s drawing on so many different influences and ideas that there are gonna be some parts of it that you dislike no matter what. In no world could the game be described as cohesive; for example, the rhythm elements and the puzzles have truly nothing to do with one another, ever. But it also feels very singular, polished, and well executed. This feels like a game that one guy really wanted to make, and even if not every part of it clicked for me, I still ultimately had a ton of fun. I mean, there’s great music, there’s a cat enemy that fucks with you by forcibly switching your gravity, there’s a grappling hook. What more needs to be said?

Makoto Wakaido’s Case Files
Released on Steam: 2023-10-18
Purchased by me: 2024-05-10
Time/Amount played: 10-12hrs (approx due to AFKing a lot), about 75% way through the entire game
Brief Let's Play

Plays a bit like Ace Attorney Investigations, which are the Miles Edgeworth spinoffs. Investigations and connecting the dots, but no "Courtroom phase." While it is an interactive visual novel, it definitely leans more toward visual novel, in the sense that there are no penalties for getting answers wrong. And checking leads and questioning people is very simple since the game tells you who you need to talk while a lead is "selected."

There are four cases. Naturally, the first is really easy, acting more as a tutorial, but by the last one, I did have to start remembering details and facts and deducing things based on the testimony and evidence. But since there are no penalties, it's not a big deal if I can't figure out; just go through each multiple choice answer until the correct one is selected. Each case does have a twist (because what good is a mystery without a twist?) and it's not terribly far-fetched, which is good.

Visuals and audio are great. It's 8-bit with a very muted color palette, which helps set the ambiance. Though blood is always bright red, which I think really sells the seriousness. Dialog is alright; I think it gets better in the latter cases. I wonder if the dialog issues are an issue of translation (game was made by a Japanese team).

Overall, mostly pleased with the game. If I had to assign a rating, I'd say 6.5/10. Not the most exciting game, but the cases and stories are just interesting enough. I expect I'll finish this game sometime this week.

Nine Noir Lives
Released on Steam: 2022-09-07
Purchased by me: 2023-12-22
Time/Amount played: 1.5hrs so far
Brief Let's Play

For being the only game this dev/publisher, Silvernode Games, has, it's pretty solid! The art style is great. It has full voice acting and the VAs are pretty good at that (though some of the voice audio mixing and such could be better). For an indie game, it looks really well put-together.

Definitely a true Point & Click Adventure game. The humor is pretty funny (to me); it kinda reminds me of a toned-down Archer (the animated spy show). Some of the dialog can be a bit long, but it being VA'd helps a bunch. And that dialog makes the characters feel more alive; it gives them depth.

Not very far into the game, so so far haven't come across any esoteric puzzles (and I hope I don't). But I am for sure looking to play more.

Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma
Released on Steam: 2016-06-29
Purchased by me: 2019-07-08
Time/Amount played: 37min
Brief Let's Play

So my goal with each of these games is to play at least 30min, ideally closer to 60min. As you can see, I just barely got over my minimum. Spike Chunsoft, who makes the Danganronpa series, also makes the Zero Escape series. Which I've played the three main games and finished the first two. So I thought I'd like this. I wasn't sold.

Interestingly, I "won" Zero Time Dilemma in like the first 10min! It's a branching path story game, so at the very first decision point, I chose correctly, the team was released, and the credits rolled! Naturally, I went back to choose the "wrong" choice, which allowed me to actually play the game, but it lost me pretty quickly after that.

Felt like it was jumping around too much. And I also felt like I was missing some important information and context. Which I think is because I didn't play the first two games. Wait, I played the first entry "Nine Hours, Nine Person, Nine Doors," but it was years ago and I didn't finish it, nor do I remember much from it. I actually didn't know this was trilogy until now. There's a second game called "Virtue's Last Reward," which I definitely haven't played. I get the feeling that, unlike Danganronpa 3, it's really, really important to play the first two games. Because there were clearly references to some event that some characters experienced together before the events of ZTD. And I was just lost.

Ended my run and decided that if I go back to ZTD, I'm going to have to finish the first two games. Which I don't know when that will happen.

Akiba's Trip: Undead & Undressed
Released on Steam: 2015-05-26
Purchased by me: 2021-05-05
Time/Amount played: 50min
Brief Let's Play

OK, so the other games are pretty straightforward as to why they belong in the category I listed. It may not be as clear here. So let me try:

Literally anime degen stuff, with a combat system that involves pulling enemies' clothes off.

Yeah...

I didn't buy this game based off that. I bought it because I like anime games that take place in modern times. Like Persona, Tokyo Xanadu, and Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth. OK, I knew there was some degen based on the name of the game. There's clearly a play on words: "Akiba's Trip" could be "Akiba Strip." And it also says "Undressed." I just didn't know it was that degen.

Some of the dialog is funny. For example, the MC got involved in this whole turning into a sorta vampire that steals clothes because he saw an opportunity as a lab rat that paid in figurines and manga. Like tf? Who does that? And some of the dialog options allow the player to live that otaku or incel life. Kinda like Denji from Chainsaw Man. Y'know, Boobs. I will not elaborate.

As far as the rest of the game, I thought the art style was great. It managed to capture that stereotypical busy Tokyo Akihabara streets feel (like I'd know as if I've been to Japan). It uses active combat that feels a bit like a fighting game. You have to punch, leg sweep/kick, block, all at the right times, with the aim of damaging the enemies' clothes to pull them off. Unfortunately, I'm terrible at action combat, so that was a bit of a turn-off. The MC was def getting his clothes pulled off, sigh.

I might come back to this game, but probably not anytime soon. I think if I want that modern-day Tokyo game itch scratched, I'll go back to those other games like Persona et al that I mentioned.

Intravenous
Released on Steam: 2021-07-26
Purchased by me: ??? (Steam didn't tell me; must've gotten it free)
Time/Amount played: 78min and continuing
Brief Let's Play

I love stealth games. Hitman, Splinter Cell, Desperadoes 3, and Deus Ex HR/MD are some of my favorite games. And right away, Intravenous scratched that itch.

It's a top-down game, where naturally, hiding in the shadows and reducing sound are important. It even has the light meter like Splinter Cell games! And just like in other stealth games, it's necessary to hide bodies in dumpsters, in rooms, or environmental cover. I try for full stealth runs, but I'll shoot if I have to, which is what I did in the first level. Knocked out like 10 dudes and shot three dead, then sneaked out quietly. So much fun just snooping around, trying to see where the baddies are, seeing their movement patterns, and then determining what I should do.

I do wish that seeing into buildings was a little more difficult. The view I have is as if there aren't any roofs. So I can immediately see baddies in buildings. I think it'd be more interesting if the only way to see guys inside was by windows or even utilizing sound.

Like Desperadoes 3, the game has a quicksave/quickload system. But you're limited to 5 quicksaves per level. After that, no more. I think you can load as many times as you want, though. Still, I had to be a little judicious in how I used the QSs. I can't just quicksave before attempting to knock out or sneak by each baddy. Certainly makes it more challenging.

I've only finished the first level, but I definitely intend to play more of this. Since Splinter Cell as a series seems dead, I think Intravenous is going to be a good substitute. And I know there's a second one already!

Today's puzzle was one where I really didn't understand why they put the purple group as the hardest one. The group was "office" and I saw it right away and thought it was going to be the green group, with only outfits being more obvious.

Connections
Puzzle #886
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟨🟨🟨🟨

I really dislike puzzles like today that have a weird twist that make some of the filled in answers into nonsense. I find it way more difficult to figure everything out when that happens. I had 29A "RONESEYES" put in as well as 59A "ROFAPPLAUSE" filled in before I kind of got it. I felt like those had to be wrong, but they were right, it's just a twist.

Call of the Sea is mostly a notes & audiologs game, with a couple Myst-light puzzles thrown in. The player is a woman exploring a mysterious island, trying to figure out what happened to a previous expedition which included her missing husband, all the while talking to herself in a surprisingly cheerful voice. Its a nicely slow paced game, which is probably what I needed this week!

I think it looks really nice in a stylized way. Each successive level somehow seems to look even better than the previous, though of course that's subjective. The art style, combined with it being a narrative game is probably why I've seen the comparison with Firewatch. I loved Firewatch when I played it earlier this year, and I think one of its strengths is that its main storytelling device, ongoing radio conversations, feels natural ()not to mention well-written). Call of the Sea doesn't quite hit that, as it trades conversation for the main character's stream of consciousness. The comparison is probably reinforced by the main character's voice actor, who also played the voice on the radio in Firewatch. I think she's very good in both roles, though in Call of the Sea she seems just a bit too cheerful at times. While it fits the theme of lighthearted exploration, there are moments where she has a serious discovery ("is the whole crew of this ship dead? What terrible fate befell them and possibly my husband") followed shortly after by the worry-free remarks of someone out for a nature walk ("look at these fascinating carved wood statues!"). I don't think darkening the tone of the game is the answer, but I suspect there could have been some more consistency in the direction of the dialogue.

There's only a couple puzzles per level, and so far none have been especially challenging. Rather they're just an enjoyable bit of friction in the exploration of the island. I have gotten stuck a few times, and when I finally figured it out I kicked myself for not seeing the obvious solution.

The most challenging puzzle of all though - where to slot this game on my bingo board! Of course I could put it as a wildcard. The developers, Out of the Blue, I had never heard of (this their first game). Also they're from Spain, so could count as a game from a different country. And then there's the longshot option: when looking this game up on Wikipedia, I discovered that it shares a name with a movie from 1930, which has a familiar sounding story.

Lt. Cmdr. Good (Edwards) is a naval officer who goes on an extensive search for his long-lost friend who mysteriously disappeared on a tropical island

While I find no evidence that anybody at all has watched this movie in the past 95 years (it might be lost media, or maybe no one has cared enough to find out), I could happily ignore that that and slot the game as an adaptation. The chaos makes it tempting, but different country gets me much closer to 5 in a row, so I'm taking that.

While we're on the topic of "Island Explorer" media, one thing this game may have unfortunately inherited from those roots is some aspect of colonialism. I won't say much about it since I don't know a lot about the cultures involved, but phrases like "Polynesians don't build doors" (considered significant enough to both say out loud and have as an entry in the in-game journal) does give me pause. However I haven't seen anything worse than that, and its more respectful and sensitive than the islander stereotypes that this type of setting would have featured even fairly recently.

Overall I have been really enjoying this game, and plan to continue. Compared with the 4 from last week that I ended early, this is a winner!

Let's be clear: I've never been a fan of pure gambling games, especially the kind that were common on consoles before the 2010s. Once you figure out the optimal way to win in those simplified setups, reaching the end goal becomes a matter of patience, not skill.

In the SNES version of Vegas Stakes, that goal is turning a modest thousand dollars into ten million across five casinos. Unfortunately, even HAL Laboratory, the same developer behind Kirby, does little to expand beyond the basic gambling gameplay or enhance it with much flair.

The game features five casino classics: Slots, Roulette, Craps, Poker, and my personal favorite, Blackjack. Two of them involve cards, though they're definitely not the collectible kind.

Each of these games works exactly as expected, for better or worse. Back in the day, Vegas Stakes offered a simple and affordable taste of casino fun without real-world risk. But after the 2000s, free digital casino games made that appeal feel outdated.

One of the standout aspects, for its time at least, is the presentation. HAL made good use of digitized character sprites, semi-realistic casino backdrops, and a catchy soundtrack to sell the Las Vegas vibe. That said, a few of the music choices border on grating, thanks to some questionable instrument samples.

The NPC interactions add some extra flavor. You pick one of four companions to join you, each offering advice and commentary while you play. Other NPCs wander the casino, occasionally giving tips, making requests, or just being unhelpfully rude, which is all part of the charm.

At one point, a regular in the sci-fi-themed casino told me to bet based on "feeling vibrations". That's... not how roulette works, but his advice on betting red or black is still among the safest options. Since nearly half the wheel is covered by each color, with two green spaces excluded, it's pretty much a 50/50 shot to double your bet.

If you're aiming just to roll credits, you could save after every win and reload after each loss. The casino you choose determines the bet limits, and the pricier ones yield the largest payouts. Of course, that's where "playing your cards right" really matters.

Or, if you use a software emulator and prefer brute efficiency, there's even a way to "cheese" the roulette: savestate before a spin, then memorize the number and reload to pick that one instead. The outcome is predetermined when the round starts, which makes it possible to game the system completely.

Overall, Vegas Stakes isn't a bad collection of casino games. It's fun in small bursts or when playing with a friend, but grinding through the single-player campaign feels more like battling against luck than actually winning.

Tales from Toyotoki: Arrival of the Witch (aka イハナシの魔女, lit. The Witch of Ihanashi) might be one of the most obscure games ever played during a Backlog Burner event on modern platforms. Despite being nominated for several Japanese indie game awards in 2022 and getting an official English translation in 2024, this slice-of-life visual novel has flown almost entirely under the radar in the English-speaking community, save for a few scattered reviews and YouTube playthroughs.

The story follows Hikaru Nishime, a boy who lost his parents at a young age. On his aunt's advice, he travels to live with his grandfather on a remote Okinawan island called Toyotoki. When he arrives, he discovers his grandfather has already moved overseas. To make things worse, he can't reach his aunt, and the local school claims to have no record of him. Stranded without survival skills, Hikaru ends up wandering the island's sugarcane fields at night, searching for shelter.

That's when he meets Lilun Jaminthida, an engimatic girl who defies normal Japanese conventions. She agrees to team up with him, and together they try to figure out how to survive, and, along the way, learn more about themselves and each other. Why she came to the island remains a mystery, though it's clear to me she has her own reasons.

The visual novel deals with some surprisingly heavy themes beneath its gentle tone. Namely...

Visually, the game's backgrounds resemble real-world photos, sometimes with soft cel-shading and grainy textures, creating a relaxed, nostalgic atmosphere. The character designs are simple yet expressive, fitting the tone of this quiet, heartfelt narrative.

I picked this one up on Steam for about two-thirds of its original $29.99 CAD price, after reading a few positive impressions. About three hours in, I'm already convinced that this tender coming-of-age, boy-meets-girl story might end up being my sleeper hit of the decade.

A 3D platformer that's cozy? That's not something you see every day.

You play as Claire, a black anthropomorphic bird exploring an open-world park in search of tools and collectibles to help herself and other animal residents. She can run, jump, climb, swim, use tools and even glide across the landscape; mobility that feels refreshing in such a small, relaxed setting.

Can't reach a high ledge? No problem. That's where golden feathers come in. Each one you collect adds another jump and extends Claire's climbing stamina, letting her scale even higher cliffs with ease.

With just seven feathers, I managed to reach the mountain peak using one of the alternate routes, and then glided all the way home after finally getting a cell signal. Thanks to a bit of platforming intuition (and maybe a lucky shortcut or two), I wrapped up the game in under 45 minutes, about half the time it takes for the average player according to HowLongToBeat.

The short length and gentle difficulty, combined with the crisp, pixelated flat-shaded visuals, give A Short Hike its unmistakably peaceful identity. It's cozy and uplifting, perfect for anyone wanting to relax without diving into the long-term commitment of a life sim like Animal Crossing.

As for me, I'll definitely be revisiting it later. I've still got plenty of the island left unexplored and a few mini-games untouched, which probably explains all the collectibles I missed. Fortunately, A Short Hike makes going back just as enjoyable as the first climb.

When the PlayStation 4 launched on November 15, 2013, Finnish developer Housemarque released one of its strongest launch titles right out of the gate: Resogun, a fast-paced 2D wraparound shoot 'em up that still stands as a Sony console exclusive.

You pilot a ship through five cylindrical voxel-based stages, blasting waves of enemies across three phases before facing a boss at the end of each level. It may sound like classic shoot 'em up fare, but where Resogun really shines is its intricate scoring system built around precision, risk, and timing.

To rack up big points, maintaining your chain multiplier is key. You'll do this by collecting green orbs from destroyed enemies, while avoiding unnecessary bomb use and rescuing humans for additional end-stage bonuses.

Rescuing humans is the real heart of the scoring system, and it's trickier than it sounds. Some appear after defeating specific sets of "Keepers", while others spawn when your multiplier is held high enough to glow green. Once freed, you need to rush them to an escape pod before they're caught by Abductors, vanish from the stage, or fall victim to a poorly timed wave of fire.

A fun quirk: you can actually juggle multiple humans in the air to chain bonus points, tossing and catching them repeatedly to score millions. The throwing mechanic even reacts to your ship's momentum; boosting helps you toss them farther, which is great for sliding them straight into escape pods while dodging onslaught of bullets and foes.

It's a hectic system with plenty of room for failure, but the game's dual-direction firing helps balance things out by letting you shoot left or right instantly without turning around. Between enemy swarms, rescues, and tight scoring mechanics, there's a constant sense of flow that keeps the experience engaging.

The base game includes two main modes: Arcade, which strings all five levels together, and Single Level, where you can tackle any individual stage. Several DLCs later expanded the package with extra modes, though I haven't picked them up yet, and probably won’t.

Even so, what's here is more than enough to keep me coming back. I shall finish all five levels across both modes and push for higher scores.

You know what's funny? Untitled Goose Game, a game where you stealthily prank unsuspecting villagers as a mischievous domestic goose, ended up being both my wildcard pick and the title that clinched my Backlog Bingo win this event. Convenient, right?

The game takes place in a quiet English village, where each zone presents a fresh set of environmental puzzles designed to spark chaos among the locals. One of my favorite tasks was staging a perfect picnic. It sounds simple; just gather a few items, but things got messy once the portable radio came into play.

To actually complete it, I had to move soil bags and the shovel a bit away from the garden gate, toggle the water valve to activate the sprinkler, and drag the radio across the yard onto the picnic mat. The trick was the timing: the farmer always rushes toward whichever object is triggered last. Moving everything else out of place buys you just enough time to pull off the prank.

Structurally, it really does feel like a wholesome, nonviolent take on the Hitman formula: just with a honking bird instead of a bald assassin. House House, the developer, clearly took inspiration from that series when designing these mini stealth-sandbox challenges.

If you ever get stuck, the pause menu's checklist gives helpful nudges on what to do next. Completing certain objectives eventually unlocks the next area.

So far, Untitled Goose Game has been delightful with its clever puzzles, dry humor, and charm packed into just an hour of playtime. I'll definitely be finishing this one soon.

Crimson Shroud is one of the four titles included in the Guild01 compilation, alongside others like Liberation Maiden, which I talked about last week. Think of it as an offbeat throwback to the late SquareSoft-era JRPGs you might have seen on the PlayStation 2, except scaled down for the Nintendo 3DS' low-resolution screens.

The development team involved several well-known names from that golden era of Japanese RPGs. Most notably, Yasumi Matsuno, famous for Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story, was given complete creative freedom here, handling both the story and overall game design.

In Crimson Shroud, every character appears as a miniature game piece moving across static, diorama-style environments. Dice rolls determine certain battle outcomes, blending traditional JRPG combat with tabletop role-playing mechanics. Combined with its lengthy, selectively narrated story sequences, the game feels like an imaginative Dungeons & Dragons session told through text and visuals rather than full animation.

The story takes place in a world where magic is only just beginning to emerge. Interestingly, the game avoids a traditional experience-level system. Instead, character progression comes entirely from gear, each weapon or accessory alters stats and may grant unique spells. Choosing the right equipment for each fight becomes as strategic as the combat itself.

Outside of battle, MP slowly drains as you explore, though it can be restored with items or by attacking enemies. Both skills and spells consume MP, but the system encourages smart cycling of physical attacks and recovery between magic bursts. The mage Frea, for example, has a Focus skill that quickly regenerates her MP, a necessity given her high spell costs. With just a few turns of recharging, it's possible to cycle through most of her abilities even early on.

Bonus dice occasionally drop during combat and can be added to future rolls. These give you extra chances to land critical hits or increase damage output, handy when a fight starts getting too close for comfort.

After about an hour of play, I'm still in the first area, partly because of how text-heavy and deliberate the pacing is. Yet despite that slow start, the worldbuilding and unique tabletop-inspired design have me hooked enough to keep going.

Another Guild01 entry on the Nintendo 3DS, Weapon Shop de Omasse is a rhythm-based comedy JRPG that flips the usual fantasy adventure premise on its head. Instead of playing a hero, you're the blacksmith's apprentice, whose job is helping your father forge and rent weapons to aspiring adventurers embarking on quests.

Each weapon you forge has its own stats and damage type, sword, spear, or club/axe, and, every customer has proficiencies ranging from level 1 to 3. Matching the right hero with the right weapon boosts their chances of success, which means a better payout and a nicely returned weapon for you to rent again later.

The heart of the gameplay lies in its rhythm-based blacksmithing minigame, best experienced with the 3DS stylus for tactile precision. You strike the glowing metal to the beat of the music, shaping weapon parts and maintaining the heat at optimal levels. Perfect timing rewards you with stronger stats, bonus durability, and the satisfaction of watching your creation come together before quenching it in water. You can also polish finished or returned weapons to squeeze even more performance out of them.

Unfortunately, that's where the fun starts to wear thin. The core loop promises charm but ends up repetitive, with the same few forging tracks and limited management mechanics. The shopkeeping systems are barebones, leaving little room for strategy beyond basic matching and timing.

The in-game "Grindcast" (basically a medieval parody of Twitter) injects some humor by letting you read your customers' updates and rants about their adventures. While it delivers some amusing moments, it doesn't make the core gameplay any deeper or more rewarding.

After giving it a fair shot, I did a bit of research and found that many players shared my impression; the novelty fades long before the credits roll. As much as the premise and humor appealed to me, Weapon Shop de Omasse just doesn't hold up next to deeper or more dynamic shop simulation games. Might be time to hang up the hammer on this one.

Back in the late 90s, I remember playing Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee on my PS1 hooked up to a chunky CRT TV, with a rented disc spinning away. As a kid, I pushed through dozens of areas without paying much attention to the worker Mudokons and eventually gave up when the puzzles became too tough. More than two decades later, the game's dark yet strangely hopeful atmosphere has stayed with me. That lingering impression finally pushed me to revisit it, this time with a secondhand copy of the original PS1 version.

This 2D puzzle-platformer begins with Abe, a modest employee of the month at RuptureFarms, a grim meat-processing factory. Early on, he overhears his boss, Molluck the Glukkon, discussing a new product line meant to save the company from declining profits: Mudokon Pops, made from the factory's own workers. Horrified, Abe sets out to escape and rescue his 99 brethren from becoming raw ingredients, while dodging Sligs, armed enforcers tasked with keeping the laborers in line.

One of the first things I tackled was a secret area I remembered watching in a 100% walkthrough. Even within just two screens, the puzzle's complexity instantly reminded me of why this game's level design is so genius, and occasionally brutal.

Abe's movement and the environment are both grid-based, which means everything behaves consistently and predictably. It's ideal for a puzzle game that relies on precision, but it also makes movement feel stiff during intense moments. Many times, Abe met an untimely end simply because a small input mistiming caused him to run off a ledge. To move effectively, you really have to let him fully transition to the next grid space before performing another action, no rushing allowed.

The New 'n' Tasty remake addressed this by making the controls analog and physics-based, but that change didn't come without issues. The puzzles weren't redesigned around the new movement, which means some sequences actually feel harder to execute cleanly than they did in the original.

One feature that still stands out today is Abe's GameSpeak system. By saying commands like "Hello!" followed by "Follow me!" or "Wait!", Abe can guide or halt fellow Mudokons. Lead them to a bat-shaped portal, chant to activate it, and they'll leap to safety, counting as an official "Escapee". It's an optional task, but one that the game encourages through visual reminders and on-screen signs.

Chanting also allows Abe to possess other creatures, provided there aren't any red orbs blocking him. Taking control of a Slig, for example, lets you use its firearm to clear paths or scout areas safely, adding another layer to the puzzle-solving.

Aside from the secret area, most puzzles leading up to the second level do a solid job of teaching mechanics through gameplay rather than text. Challenges ramp up steadily, especially in rooms where you rescue enslaved Mudokons, but they rarely feel unfair once you understand the puzzle's logic.

So far, this odyssey has been well worth the return. The puzzles remain clever and rewarding, balancing tension and humor in a way few games from that era did. I'll definitely continue playing this one.