Welcome to another Video Game Round-Up! I played a bunch of video games this month, almost all of which I’ve never written about before! A whole bunch of new games! Five of the new games are on this list because of a weekly “show” I’ve started on my YouTube channel, called Adan Plays Through His Backlog (every Wednesday!). I technically only started it this month with Action Henk (PS4) and Aegis Defenders (PS4), but I grandfathered in last month’s Yakuza Kiwami (PS4) stream in as Episode 0. Basically, this show is a way for me to play a bunch of games I own, but have never touched before (some of which I’ve owned for years, and am embarrassed I’ve yet to play). Some of these games I will continue playing on my own time to complete, others I’ll never touch again, and others still I will return to at some point in the future, but not any time soon (like Yakuza Kiwami :P ). With the exception of the grandfathered Yakuza Kiwami, I’m playing these games in alphabetical order.
The other two new games this month are games I’m playing live on stream: Ghost of Tsushima (PS4) and Paper Mario: The Origami King (Switch) (12 episodes in on both). Basically, I’m streaming a lot, and you should subscribe and watch and give all the videos a like (that’s what the kids are saying, right?).
But enough about that, let’s get to the games!
Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Switch) - This game is still a daily thing for us. There are always fun things to do (and new creatures to capture every month), and after doing a stream on the first of the month, our friend Eugene told us that multiple people could actually play on the same island on the same Switch... AT THE SAME TIME! So now there’s a Little Adan joining Little Feli on the island of Tardisland! The way this works is that there’s always a leader who can do all the usual stuff one can do on ACNH, while the follower has a limited amount of things they can do. The camera also follows the leader (so if the follower falls behind and off the screen, they will be teleported near the leader). But you can switch the leader position easily back and forth. All you really need for two people to play is two accounts on the Switch, and two Joy-Cons (because each Joy-Con can be its own controller). When we play together, Felicia uses the Joy-Cons and I use the Hori controller :D
You’ll get a look at Little Adan the next time we stream this game together :)
Ghost of Tsushima (PS4) - As mentioned above, I’ve been streaming this game, and while this is a good game with good mechanics that is very fun to play, I mostly want to talk about how this game feels: it feels like an old-school Kurosawa samurai movie! It’s big and epic and cinematic as hell, but there is actually a mode that changes it to black-and-white with a grainy film stock, and this mode is called Kurosawa Mode. I don’t use this mode too often because the game is far too gorgeous in color, but I have used it a couple of times in key situations, like the beginning of one of the duels, which was awesome.
I’ll probably finish the story in this game next month, as I’ve just entered Act III, the final act of the game. However, this is an open-world game, so there are a lot of sidequests, collectibles, and forts to take, which I will likely do on my own time in the post-game (except, of course, for at least Sensei Ishikawa and Lady Masako’s quests, because those are interesting as hell).
Paper Mario: The Origami King (Switch) - I’m also streaming this hilarious and light RPG as a counterbalance to the very serious Ghost of Tsushima (though it does have some sad and scary moments because Nintendo likes screwing with all of us). There are a bunch of hilarious puns all over this game, usually paper-related, but not always. The Paper Mario series started out as an RPG, but has evolved to... well, I’m not entirely sure. It’s still has some light RPG mechanics, but mostly a Toad-saving sim and a lot of puzzles. In fact, it’s so many puzzles, even the battles are puzzles! The bad guys are arrayed on concentric circles around Mario, and I have a certain amount of time and a certain number of moves to put all the bad guys in either rows or squares so I can bop them all at once. It sounds easy, but it can be really hard! I have failed many, many times, and it makes me feel dumb. I can ask for help from the various Toads I have save and they do the first move for me, and I’ve been doing that a lot recently. But for reals, my favorite part is all the puns. The puns are great!
I think I’ve got another 3-4 hours before I finish the game, and then I’ll have to decide if I want to go back and 100% the game (there are a lot of collectibles!).
The Last of Us Part II (PS4) - After finishing this last month, I went back and platinumed it! Whoo! This wasn’t a very difficult platinum, but I did have to play through most of the game a second time, which was time-consuming, but a lot less scary :D
I didn’t say this last month, but this is definitely a contender for Game of the Year, and at some point, I’ll probably have to go deep into spoilers for why this was so goddamn great. Haters gonna hate, of course, but I loved it for most of the reasons they hate it.
Action Henk (PS4) - The first game I played for Adan Plays Through His Backlog was this action figure running game that I got free through Playstation Plus. It plays like a Trials game: there is a fixed course that the action figure automatically runs on, and you control its speed and when it jumps. This was fun at first, but got boring pretty quickly because, while the courses get more difficult, it’s still basically the same thing over and over. I could only play it for about a half hour, then moved on...
Aegis Defenders (PS4) - ...to this game. This was a lot more fun, and, while I didn’t realize while I was playing it, it was basically a platformer/tower defense game. I also got this through Playstation Plus. You play as Clu and her grandfather Bart as they go relic hunting. There’s some puzzle platforming until they find the the relic, and then they have to defend the relic from various monsters. You get some time to put down defenses before the monsters show up, and the rest of it plays in real-time. Each defense section has multiple waves, and there is a chance to upgrade weapons and such between levels. Yeah, this was a lot more fun than Action Henk and I played it for the remaining hour and a half of the show.
AER: Memories of Old (PS4) - The second episode of Adan Plays Through His Backlog featured this excellent puzzle platformer. You play as Auk, a woman who can turn into a bird and explore a bunch of floating islands in the sky. She has to find various old gods before the world is further destroyed (it was nearly destroyed once already, hence all the floating islands). I spent most of my time with the game flying around the various islands, unlocking the full map before finally figuring out what I was supposed to do to move the story beyond the initial tutorial section (it’s not super obvious at first). This feels like a very short game, so I plan to finish it off (and probably platinum it as it seems quite easy to do so) before my next Video Game Round-Up!
AI: The Somnium Files (Switch) - This cyberpunk/magical anime detective game was my third Adan Plays Through His Backlog episode. It feels a lot like a much weirder Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (and if you know the Phoenix Wright games, that’s really damn weird), but without the courtroom stuff. You have to question witnesses and suspects, scour crime scenes for clues, and occasionally go inside people’s dreams to a) catch a serial killer, and b) learn your character’s own history from before he got amnesia five years ago.
The weirdness in this game isn’t as charming as Phoenix Wright, and the main character, Date, is kind of sexist jerk (at least in the initial two hours I played), which makes it difficult to root for him. The mystery is compelling, however, and the characters who aren’t Date are interesting and not such obvious jerks (except for one, though I think that’s very much on purpose, as opposed to Date who I think is supposed to funny and/or charming), so I think I will eventually come back to this. I didn’t know how to pronounce the AI in the title (as two separate letters “A.I.”, or as a word that rhymes “eye”) until about an hour into the game. It’s “eye”, FYI.
Also, I do really hope Date stops being such a jerk.
Marvel’s Avengers Beta (PS4) - Squenix put out a beta for this game the past weekend for people who pre-ordered on the PS4, and I am one of those. So I streamed it. The initial mission during A-Day that has been shown many, many times was the initial mission in the beta, but then you could do a couple more missions with Kamala Khan (aka Ms. Marvel) and the Hulk busting up A.I.M. goons in a rainforest and then the snowy wastes of Siberia. It seems like a lot of the story cutscenes were removed, which only makes sense if they thought we hadn’t all seen that A-Day marketing stuff before.
While I enjoyed most of the gameplay, I was a little perturbed by how much loot there was to collect. All of this stuff boosts your characters’ stats and makes them better, but it also feels like we’re gonna have to grind a lot. That said, I did enjoy the story bits a lot, and Kamala is a joy to play with/as. Her love of and nerdiness about all things Avengers is really quite infectious.
I really hope I can play the whole game without other people though :P
The Almost Gone (Switch) - The final game on this month’s Round-Up was featured in the fourth Adan Plays Through His Backlog, and it’s a fantastic collection of spooky puzzle boxes. Every level/area is broken up into a square, and you have to rotate them, open things, grab things, solve mini-puzzles, and basically run around figuring out how to exit each level. In the two hours I played on stream, the exit was always obvious (a boarded-up door, a locked gate, etc.), but figuring out how to open that exit was less obvious. I had a blast trying to figure all these little dioramas out, and there was a person in chat (who I’m pretty sure I know in real life, but not sure enough to actually say their name) who really came through in clutch situations. There was one puzzle in the initial area that I was just not getting until they basically said, “Hey, try this thing that totally looks like you can interact with it,” which I had of course not realized you could interact with.
As I said before, there is a spooky and creepy undercurrent to all this, as the narrator tells us their family history, and how utterly broken it all was, while some truly terrifying black goo chases us around (“chases” is a strong word; there’s no real-time anything, but it’s ever-present, and it does not look good). It’s my belief that the narrator is dead, and this is their life flashing before their eyes. I will definitely finish this game sometime soon.
And that’s all the games I played this month! I suspect the number of games I play will hover around this number as long as I continue streaming. There will be one or two games I will play all the way through (one on the Switch and one on the PS4) and various other games I play thanks to Adan Plays Through His Backlog (at least four a month, but sometimes more because I’ll play more than one per episode). Plus, of course, the ever present Animal Crossing: New Horizons :)
Until next month, play more video games!
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