Be Excellent To Each Other

81. Doors and Rooms 3
82. Escape Funky Island
83. Superliminal
84. Donut County
85. Cadillacs and Dinosaurs 2
86. The Witch's Isle
87. Planet Alpha: 2D puzzle-platformer with stealth elements and an ability to control the day/night cycle of the game in order to progress. Sadly absolutely everything about that sentence is massively over-selling the game because 99% of it's just "hold right to progress" with some incredibly basic puzzling thrown in seemingly just to slow you down. It's jaw-dropping fucking beautiful for most of it's run time which is perhaps why it's not getting the slagging it deserves in user reviews but even that just becomes background to the monotony of the actual gameplay. I'm genuinely amazed that at no point during the development no one noticed that great sections of it had you doing literally nothing but stabbing the jump button every now and again without ever even having to let go of the left stick. Bizarre.

44) INSIDE (Xbox)

What can I say about this amazing game that hasn’t already been said?

Did you know it was only made because of co-funding from the European Union?

That’ll do. That’ll do, Pig.

81. Doors and Rooms 3
82. Escape Funky Island
83. Superliminal
84. Donut County
85. Cadillacs and Dinosaurs 2
86. The Witch's Isle
87. Planet Alpha
88. Doors: Awakening: another Snapbreak puzzler for Android that has you swiping around bite-sized levels poking and pressing at stuff to open a central door. Rarely challenging but polished, pretty and satisfying.
89. Metrico+: a puzzle-platformer that started out life on the Vita before being ported to other platforms.

The aesthetic is 'dreamy 70s Excel charts' with moving bar graphs and pie charts often making up the level furniture. The actual gameplay is interesting in that each level mixes up the 'inputs' required to progress. Maybe on one level I need to shoot myself to move one gate while purposely falling down a whole to move a second one; before exiting via a final platform that moved depending on how many time I'd hit the jump button. On the next level perhaps things only moved when I walked right.

New elements are introduced at points (like the final level set gives you the ability to switch places with any enemy on screen) but the core of the game remains the same: experiment with different trivial actions to see what reacts, then manipulate those reactions to get out. This means the levels mostly boil down to working out how to move without doing something e.g how do I get from (a) to (b) without jumping more than twice or firing more than two shots because doing so puts a platform permanently out of reach.

All of which sounds pretty good, and it's well enough implemented for sure, but I did find myself getting bored of it's schtick before it's four or so hours were done. Despite the new stuff it sometimes adds in there's something very samey about the various levels and only the odd time did I feel like I was being asked to do something genuinely new with its tools.

I need 8 games to complete by years end but I’m struggling to get interested in anything at all. I must have booted up a half dozen games last night and couldn’t get into any of them.

Quick Beex! Recommend me some decent games that might only last a hour or two that won’t bore me to tears. If I can get 8 of them I’ll try and smash the lot.

Firewatch is pretty short.

That’s a good one. People been banging on about that for ages.

7 more please.

You can get to the end credits of the Binding of Isaac in under an hour

Cannon Fodder

The Return of the Obra Dinn
The Stanley Parable
Gunpoint
Jazzpunk
To the Moon
The Unfinished Swan

I’ve done Binding of Isaac previously and one of the games I was playing recently was Gonner: Blueberry Edition which was another roguelike. To be fair, that’s the most likely to get played.

I don’t have an Amiga set up for Cannon Fodder and, frankly, anything that requires me to turn on the PC and do stuff to it make a game run is very unlikely to get played.

I’ve finished them all except The Return of the Obra Dinn. How long is that? Hang on, is that on any of the consoles though?

Do you have a Switch? Donut County is pretty short.

Also, the Aladdin/Lion King double pack. You can complete those in about 30 minutes and it would count as two games.

Yeah, that’s a good one! I quite fancy that Donut hole one.

Firewatch
Donut County
Aladdin
Lion King
Obra Dinn (if it’s on console)

Yes, was released on consoles in October. Haven’t played it yet so not sure exactly how long.

Untitled goose game is short.

Donut County is out on pretty much all platforms. You'd smash through it as it's very easy, but I loved it because swallowing stuff up with a hole of ever increasing size is just an incredibly compelling mechanic.

This is coming to Game Pass next week for freez, I heard, so that’ll do nicely.

About 8 hours apparently:

https://howlongtobeat.com/game.php?id=61882

45) Firewatch (PS4)

For a walking simulator, this is very good. I wouldn’t be half as interested if not for that brilliantly simplistic introduction sequence (that was sooo heavy and got me right into the fiction immediately) and the fantastic VA. Delilah was great.

I actually became much less interested in the story after stumbling upon the comms base when it should have been pulling me in. It never really built up to a satisfying crescendo after that (following the annoying bleeping machine should have been ditched in favour of something else. Anything else) but I thought the ending was exactly what was needed.

I did love that the watch tower on the title screen was Delilah’s rather than your own.

Imma give it...6/10. It would be a 7 but the technicals fucked me off too. 30 FPS? Bags of stuttering? Pop in? I mean, come on, it was hardly the most taxing looking game; sort your fucking shit out.