I had already heard rumblings that this game had heavy themes, but did not know about the meta commentary and fourth wall breaking. Really implemented well.

I had a lot of trouble making it through the first part of the game because I don't like VNs for their verbosity. I gave up on Mark Skelter (which is not a VN) because it kept prolonging the script by introducing an idea and then unnecessarily having each and every member of the party comment on it. But, in Doki Doki's case, it's all warranted. It warms up the player, schools neophytes that aren't familiar with the tropes inherent to the genre, and firmly establishes the "control" run of this cyclical storyline.

Am really impressed that this game is able to do so much with so little. Very few backgrounds. Only 4 characters. And the topic is books and poetry. Really a deft hand behind it all.

My runthrough started with Sayoki as the first victim and then Yuri as the second. I see there are other story paths to take, but there's no way I'm doing another run of this right now.

I am really glad to have played a game like this after Bendy. For obvious reasons.

Astrea is a draw 4, dice are free but negative effects must be played, roguelike deckbuilder. Duality is present in how there are two damage types: Purification, healing allies and lowering enemy HP, or Corruption, damaging allies and recovering enemy HP. Since the player has 3 hearts with 7 Max HP each and Corruption dice have to be played, the obvious answer is to play them on the enemy since they have way more HP right? The issue is that applying corruption to them increases their overcorruption meter which allows them to pull off their special move the moment it maxes out, even during your turn or right after they've already attacked, which can lead to overwhelming burst damage or them scaling much faster. On the flipside, the player has access to Virtues, special moves that can be used whenever the player's HP falls below a certain threshold, so the player is incentivised to have just enough defense to survive to access the full arsenal and then heal back up (and yes, it looks like being damaged then healing then self-damaging again refreshes the Virtue. The 2nd character has a build doing just that).

Dice come in 5 Variants: Starter, Safe, Balanced, Risky, and Epic.

• Starters should be the first to go at the Remove 2 Dice tiles or the shop. However, they can't be removed at the Broken Shrines which allow for trading 4 non-starter dice for a Star Blessing (aka relic).

• Safe dice have all positive sides, but are lower impact.

• Balanced dice are either 3/3 or 4/2 good/bad ratio and are middle of the road in effect.

• Risky dice are either 2/4 good/bad ratio or all sides have a good and bad effect at the same time.

• Epic dice can only be found as a boss drop, from events, or for 300 shards from the Epic Shops. Epic dice are always high-impact with only positive sides, but can't be duplicated.

Dice can have their sides turned into another effect through the shop or specific forge dice (excepting dice with unforgable faces) and all the characters have a reroll virtue bulit-in, so the riskier dice can be worth grabbing provided proper risk management. There are also opportunities to duplicate good dice, whether at the duplicate tile or paying up at the shop.

Per deckbuilder norms, a small deck is usually better for consistency and getting to the good dice faster. Since enemy encounters drop 2 dice, it's usually better to ignore the dice chest tiles in favor of money tiles (skipping a die gives 10 shards while the shard tiles give 50). The destroy 2 dice tiles and shops give the opportunity to trim out the starter dice and the broken shrines can take away 4 non-starter dice after deciding a deck's direction and course-correcting.

There's more to it of course, but the game's intuitive and I had fun. The low max hp with healing and dice rolling makes for a nice change of pace from Slay the Spire 2. I've had a win with each character (required to unlock the 6th character and then a win with him unlocks the true final boss) and 2 wins against said true final boss so I can at least say I've has a decent look at the game so far.

Berserk Boy is a Megaman-inspired game; there's the basic "stop the mad scientist" plot ala Classic, the base is reminiscent of Zero, particularly with the two operators in the background of the teleport room, and there are 5 Biometals Berserk Orbs to collect from the bosses and Transform with like ZX.

The game also feels vaguely obnoxious on many fronts.

• The story, characters, and world aren't set up at all. That normally wouldn't be an issue considering the era the game is calling back to, but there's just enough uninspired dialogue inserted everywhere that I started to feel the urge to mash through dialogue and skip cutscenes which never happens to me. It feels like it's just giving up and going "yeah this is a legally distinct fangame, you know how the plot goes", but at that point it would've unironically been better to just cut out the dialogue from how low-effort it is.

• The hub is huge, but the only real functions are the upgrade shop and the mission select room, the latter of which is in a long hallway away from the spawning room. There is a map warp by opening the menu, but it would've been better to just not design that map that way? The hub has a lot of screens to house the NPCs that get rescued, but none of them have any changing dialogue which removes any reason to roam around and check up on them up until the path to the true final boss, which with no prompting, requires talking to 2 specific people. The hub also goes under attack after every boss fight for no narrative reason which forces the player to check every single room to take out a single monster by itself with no challenge. This is the definition of pointless padding.

• There are a ton of upgrades and new moves for the first lightning form which indicates it being the "main" form, but all of the options are stupidly expensive to purchase. It feels bad to see so many potential options just locked away by the need to farm if the player wants to see them.

• The controls feel a touch unresponsive to me. In any other game with insta-death pits or insta-death advancing spike walls or contact damage, I'd go "Oh I panicked" or "I rushed without looking" or "Oh I misspaced the positioning". Here it's just "Welp, walked off the platform cause the jump button didn't respond in time", "Welp, the Flame Drill's drilling and tornado lock the controls for a second, can't jump or switch forms!", "Welp these bosses sure inflict a lot of contact damage since they love to move a lot when the primary attack is dash attacking at them".

• The game advertises metroidvania aspects, but what that really means is impassible obstacles blocking the side paths the first time around until replaying the mission after getting all 5 forms. The game is also pretty bad at signaling which is the main path and which is the side path.

• The shoulder buttons cycle through the forms, but it's slow with 5 of them to scroll through. Meanwhile, the Form Menu allows for picking but pauses the gameplay and plays the transformation animation each and every time a form is selected from it.

Let's go over the transformations now:

• Lightning Justice. The 1st form and the one getting advertised. It has an 8-directional dash to bump into an enemy and tag them for the follow up attack which is pretty reminiscent of Gunvolt's tagging system. It has a lot more upgrades then the other forms, but they're all expensive so I don't know what any of the unlockable moves actually do.

• Flame Drill. The 2nd form and the Red CQC. A lot of bosses can fly though, so it can only offer its uppercut against them most of the time or the dig if you really need the extended i-frames. Its utility is all unwieldy though: The tornado dash bumps you quite a bit away from the enemy for what's supposed to be a gap-closer, the divekick dig goes diagonally when it's main purpose is to be able to dig under low spiked areas so there's a lot more self-damage from that then there should be, and as mentioned before, the drill mode and tornado lock controls for a sec after they end.

• Ice Kunai. The 3rd form and the broken-ass ninja. Its 8-directional dash attack goes through enemies and starts up another dash attack for hitting an enemy; this allows it to just shred a boss by dashing back and forth through them while having i-frames the entire time. It also has spammable kunais which take out the risk of the other forms needing to get close.

• Soaring Wind. The 4th form that snaps the platforming in half. It has a shield that reflects projectiles and a hover-flight mode that's freely controllable in the 8 directions; it uses up energy, but there's 2 cheap upgrades in the shop for increased 50% energy cap for all forms and decreased flight cost. As can be expected, all the platforming can be ignored with this form unless the game specifically sets up barriers with lightning or ice barriers that require those forms to go through.

• Mine Buster. The 5th form that is utterly useless. It has a short-range lock-on cone which fires a weak bullet when the weapon button is released. Since it's so useless, the game starts introducing intangible enemies and platforms until the weapon cone makes them tangible and doors that require firing a bullet at to destroy. These doors are pointless time-wasters since they're in the main path anyways and the enemies and platforming can be ignored just by flying past them.

You could do a lot worse for a Megaman-inspired game, but you could also do a whole lot better. I would've gotten more joy replaying the Zero series or Gravity Circuit.

Here's a video of it for anyone that wants a refresher.

After Red sat down and used the Transistor on herself and the screen began scrolling I was shouting at the screen, "No, that can't be the end, right? We were going to go restore everything!" And then you get their story and everything fits into place. It was a choice that Red made for herself rather than the player, similar to how she took a left on the bike ride early in the game to try to get him back rather than run away.

I love a good tragic romance so narratively the conclusion is immediately satisfying: Red and her lover are reunited in some form of the afterlife. It's picking a third option to the two that Bastion presents of Restoration or Evacuation, though there's a question of how much choice Red really has due to the setting. Even if she could restore the physical structure of Cloudbank, all the residents are gone and it doesn't appear possible for them to come back. Similarly the Country mentioned isn't as much a physical place as it is a euphemism (aside from the manifestation of it inside the Transistor that we see in Royce's fight and the end) and there's nowhere she could evacuate to, so she's left alone in an empty world. Bastion has the Kid wake up post-calamity while Red's living through it as it happens. Maybe with full administrator powers she could bring back everyone or at least create people again in some manner, but that's not something she wishes to find out.

One interpretation I read from someone wanting a happier ending is that they're literally logging off at the end and meeting in the physical world (which could also be what the Country refers to) akin to the situation the characters in Sword Art Online were stuck in, and while I can't say that's impossible I don't think there's enough evidence to support it from our limited perspective. The entirety of Cloudbank is a digital world and it seems like all the characters are also entirely AI, or at most digital copies of people so their existence is still scoped to Cloudbank even if the originals are out in another world.

Aside from that I think the setting was fascinating with absolute democracy controlling every matter of Cloudbank that can take place immediately, even trivial affairs. Everyone has a voice until it's taken by the Camerata with Red being the literal manifestation of that.

The Hundred Line - Last Defense Academy
Released on Steam: 2025-04-24
Purchased by me: 2026-04-27 (though I picked up the demo some time before)
Time/Amount played: 48hrs

Developer: Too Kyo Games, Media.Vision
Publisher: Aniplex

Theme: Tension

I'm gonna cheat a little bit, since I technically started this game a handful of days before Backlog Burner kicked off, but it was in my backlog. So I'm counting it! Also, no short LP since I initially wasn't planning on counting this game.

Anyway, I chose Tension for The Hundred Line. Between the characters, between the different parties, between the enemies of mankind and humanity, and whether the various characters believe the situation they're in, etc. I'll even say there's some tension between me, the player, and game itself.

So a quick summary. Several Tokyo high school students are taken from their boring, everyday lives in the "Tokyo Residential Complex" to go fight off unknown monsters up on the abandoned, ruined surface. The TRC is revealed to be a massive underground city. Like there's no sky; the characters had never seen the moon or stars before being "kidnapped" to the surface, where they're told they are humanity's last defense at the aptly named "Last Defense Academy." They need to last 100 days, but aren't initially told what happens at the 100 day mark. Some believe they'll be able to go back home; others are less sure. The game essentially revolves around them learning, little by little, the truth of the matter. Why they're fighting, what they're protecting, why they were chosen, what happened to the Earth on the surface, who the enemies are, who the real enemies are, etc.

It's a VN, but mixes in a "lightweight" but decent enough TRPG system. In many ways, it reminds me of Valkyrie Chronicles games.

So back to tension. The biggest tension is just that they don't know what they're doing and why they are there. Why would humanity entrust defense of the planet to a bunch of high schoolers? And several times, when someone is about to reveal some information, that person disappears. So they're constantly left in the dark. Even bits and pieces they find out on their own, are so wildly out of left field, they don't know what to believe.

Also, who to trust? Almost all of these high schoolers didn't know each other before this. They just wake up in a school, on the surface, and are told, work together, save humanity. They don't know if they can trust each other. But in order to survive, they have to learn to trust each other. But it's constantly tested as their personalities vary, they're reasons for fighting, or not fighting, are often at loggerheads. Near the end of the 100 days, humanity's last defenders are nearly ripped apart due to rumors of someone being a traitor to humanity.

Lastly, my tension. When I first started the game, I was like "surely, it's not actually 100 days." But nope, it's 100 days. Might even be more, which I'll get to.

Now some days, I'm unable to control anything. The MC that I control is like "Nah, I'm not getting up, I'm tired," and so then he goes back to sleep and then it's the next day. So the day goes by quickly. Regardless, it's actually 100 days I have to play through. It definitely gets repetitive at times. Ugh, OK.

Or, like I said, maybe more. Because somewhere around Day 80-90, hints get dropped that the end result at Day 100 will be less than ideal. Almost like a bad ending. Wait, did I mess up somewhere? I didn't really have any choices though. Like even at the very beginning of the game, I'm presented with the opportunity to fight for humanity or not. For funsies, I initially chose "No," and the game just made me choose again. And I kept choosing, "No," and the game just has me pick again until I choose "Yes." So how did I mess up? What'd I do??

And then I got to Day 100 (well, more like Day 95) and things were indeed going to shit. Key characters died. The "real" enemy revealed themselves. It's not even clear at Day 100 that we saved humanity and the world. Wha...?

However, it's then revealed the MC has the option to redo all 100 days, but with the knowledge and power he's gained up until now. Huh...

Wait...I just put almost 50hrs into this game, but now I gotta do it again? But technically different? To get the "good ending"? Ugh...OK.

So yeah, definitely a teensy bit of tension.

Overall, enjoyable game. I think I like it better than it's Danganronpa cousins.

911 Operator
Released on Steam: 2017-02-24
Purchased by me: ??? Probably got it free October 2025
Time/Amount played: 66min

Developer: Jutsu Games
Publisher: Games Operators

Theme: Chaos
Let's Play on YouTube

A couple weeks ago, there was a police helicopter circling over my apartment. Which isn't that unusual. I don't live in bad area; I feel completely safe all the time. I think it's just one of the locales they patrol.

Until I went out on to my balcony and saw cops standing by and questioning a guy sitting on the curb. Who they eventually cuffed and detained. Wanting to know what was going, I checked out the online police radio scanners.

TL;DR: the suspect allegedly robbed a nearby smokeshop, possibly armed

And boy was it chaotic. I was trying to listen to the radio that was just about this robbery. They had several officers canvassing the area. They brought up a K9 unit to help track down the suspect. At one point, they were in our complex garage trying to identify a car possibly connected with the suspect. And of course the aerial unit -- the helicopter -- looking around as well.

But there was also radio about traffic stops. Some suspicious youths hanging out by dumpster behind some building. Some band that was setting up a concert stage that accidentally set off an outdoor motion camera/sensor. Some police IT issues that were affecting field officers' and dispatches ability to send and receive accurate information.

It was chaotic. Sure, I was listening to multiple channels, but still.

And naturally, 911 Operator is like that. Now, I will admit, I've only played the tutorial/opening mission. It takes place in a suburb of Honolulu, so nothing too crazy. I only had like three police units (cars), three medical units (ambulances), and two fire units. And there weren't that many overlapping incidents. But there were a few times I sent two police units to deal with a gun raid, but then all of a sudden some vandals were destrying property elsewhere, so I send the third unit there. But then another call came in to deal with homeless people fighting in the streets. So I have to make quick decisions about rerouting officers or ambulances. It was relatively chill in this tutorial, but I imagine later on, as I get sent to bigger cities, with more emergency assets, but also more city denizens, it can get chaotic real quick.

But I can see that being fun. I like simulation and management games. So I think this is right up my alley. In-game, I've been promoted! And sent to the next city: Albuquerque, New Mexico. Which, according to the game, is one of the most violent cities in the US. Oh boy! Let's see the chaos unfold!