1. Frog Detective 2: The Case of the Invisible Wizard (PC)(Adventure)2. Revulsion (PC)(FPS)3. Nonogram - Master's Legacy (PC)(Puzzle)4. Sekiro (PC)(Action-Adventure)5. Grim Dawn (PC)(Action RPG)
6. Grim Dawn: Ashes of Malmouth (PC)(Action RPG)
7. Grim Dawn: Forgotten Gods (PC)(Action RPG)8. Viscera Cleanup Detail: Santa's Rampage (PC)(FPS)9. Viscera Cleanup Detail: Shadow Warrior (PC)(FPS)10. Shrine (PC)(FPS)11. Record of Lodoss War - Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth (PC)(Adventure)12. Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone (PC)(Action)13. Red Alliance (PC)(FPS)14. The Forest (PC)(Horror)15. Pixel Puzzles: Japan (PC)(Puzzle)16. 12 is Better Than 6 (PC)(Top Down Shooter)
17. Torchlight II (PC)(RPG)18. An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire (PC)(RPG)
19. Port of Call (PC)(Walking Sim)20. NeonCode (PC)(Walking Sim)21. Carrion (PC)(Adventure)22. Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist (PC)(Walking Sim)
23. Helltaker (PC)(Puzzle)
24. Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Martyr (PC)(RPG)25. Castlevania: Bloodlines (Switch)(Platformer)26. Treachery in Beatdown City (Switch)(RPG)27. Zeno Clash (PC)(Action)28. Borderlands: Enhanced Edition (PC)(FPS/RPG)29. Ion Fury (PC)(FPS)30. Wolfenstein: The Old Blood (PC)(FPS)31. Shrine II (PC)(FPS)
32. Lycanthorn I (PC)(Action Platformer)33. Lycanthorn II (PC)(Action Platformer)
34. DLC Quest (PC)(Adventure)
35. Live Freemium or Die (PC)(Adventure)36. Satellite Reign (PC)(Real-Time Tactics)37. Heat Signature (PC)(Action)38. HellSign (PC)(Action)39. The Walking Dead: Season Two (PC)(Point-and-Click Adventure)40. Umurangi Generation (PC)(Action)
41. Shadow of Loot Box (PC)(FPS)
42. Hellbreaker (PC)(FPS)Three more games beaten, three more skulls to add to the pile.
Umurangi GenerationUmurangi apparently means "red sky" in the Maori language. It's the near future, you're a courier in New Zealand who is way into photography, and the world is coming to an end from jellyfish-like aliens. You are the final generation that will witness the end of everything. Get your camera ready, because you have things to photograph.
Umurangi Generation is a photography game first and foremost. In each level, you have specific targets to photograph, such as red lights on railway tracks, a certain number of candles in the frame, or wall graffiti. You go for these targets so you can deliver a package, but you also have bonuses like photographs of all your friends, finding hidden film canisters, and so forth. Completing the challenges nets you new kinds of lenses, such as a fish-eye lens, telescopic lens, or ultra wide-angle, which in turn lets you take different types of shots. These photographs are judged for a monetary value based on a variety of factors, though the game never flat out tells you a picture is bad, because art is subjective. Also, you can replay levels over and over again, so if you see something you just really want to photograph, you can always come back for fun later with better gear to get your shot.
The other cool feature of Umurangi Generation is that it excels at conveying story without actually telling you anything. What makes more sense, saying the UN lost a fight against the alien invader or showing a train full of wounded survivors smoke cigarettes while staring dead-eyed at cheap hamburgers with American flags on toothpicks sticking out of them? Graffiti, posters, photographs of dead loved ones, body bags, destroyed military equipment, punks holding a dance off to rebel while UN soldiers look on from street corners...the story here is told to you without actually telling. It's visual, it's exploratory, and it's beautifully handled.
If you enjoy games where the object is to study the world, and you want something from the perspective of a modern indigenous person dealing with the impacts of both human and now alien colonization, Umurangi Generation nails it. It's hard to believe it's the vision of one person and is their first real game.
Shadow of Loot BoxDLC Quest came out nearly a decade ago, and at the time, it was an excellent means of criticizing what were then the common trends in AAA game design. Leave it to the indie scene to tackle subjects that we all seem to lambast before we go and spend our money on whatever title is continuing the trends we claim to despise. But that was the early 2010s looking back at the 2000s. We're now in the early 2020s, and gaming has continued to evolve.
So how's about a first person shooter where randomized loot boxes are everything, and you can spend your in-game currency earned via watching ads or mining for cryptocurrency to get more loot boxes or buy easy shortcuts through game levels? That's what Shadow of Loot Box is all about; every level focuses on criticizing some aspect of modern games, be it survival simulations run amok, procedurally generated level designs, levels removed so they can be turned into DLC, obnoxious leveling systems to make the character feel "unique," open world exploration, Early Access criticism, DRM issues impacting gameplay, and so on. And every level will blatantly tell you what it is criticizing at the start from quotes pulled from a faux-developer of the game. I particularly enjoy the level where there are no textures, just blocks to represent unfinished character models because the level is still in an alpha state, but hey, you paid for it!
Of course, we know the criticisms, and at a couple of hours long for a first playthrough, the game does feel a little overly long with some of its jokes. Combat is generic, with your standard set of weapons to shoot enemies that mindlessly charge you and then rapidly explode or eat your face off. Ammo pickups and experience for leveling are also only found in loot boxes, which are randomized, so you can get screwed with the RNG. And the game features checkpoint saves as an additional gripe that we've had for 20 years.
This game exists more as a curiosity than a legit game, but it's also a nice way to see what we're complaining about. I hold it up there with indie criticism titles like Cod of Duty, which is literally about shooting fish in a barrel.
HellbreakerThere are some games that offer so much promise and yet never see it, and Hellbreaker is sadly one of them. It's a first person shooter, and a solid one at that, focusing around the core idea of battling hordes of monsters at a time. Of the game's 9 levels, each features roughly 250-300 enemies, so expect to grab your minigun and go nuts. Guns are based on the traditional DOOM weapons, so pistol, shotgun, minigun, rocket launcher, etc., and enemy designs aren't exactly more advanced than what you'll see in Quake 2. Hell, the game doesn't even have a story, but you're some kind of dude in a suit fighting demon-critters in fancy tech-industrial facilities full of teleporters and the like. It's like a miss-mash of the best FPS games of the 1990s.
And it's built around speed. Hellbreaker doesn't just want you getting through the levels, it wants you getting through them
fast. You achieve medals at the end of each run based on how quickly you got through, how many enemies you killed, and how little damage you took. There are no difficulty options, so the game is always throwing everything it has at you, so you better be prepared. And if you want an extra challenge, you can turn on a timed mode where if you don't meet the par time, it's game over no matter how well you were doing. This offers some replayability for the speedrunners who like to test their skills against impressively massive groups of enemies.
The game was also intended to enable users to build their own stuff, so it comes with a level editor built in. You want to make your own Hellbreaker level? Go nuts! Unfortunately, this is where the promise ended, because despite costing about $2, only one person ever actually made any additional levels, and they stopped after about 3. And that's where the game trips and falls; it needed a fan base to really get going, and it never got one. Which is sad, because while its cribbing from the 1990s, it's cribbing from the best of the 1990s, and it makes combat fast-paced and just as fun as it is frantic.
This is a game that knows you need something always, so you get an infinite ammo peashooter pistol. But it's also a game that gives you a minigun where wind-up speed needs to be accounted for as well as angle based on distance. If you're too close, the gun is shooting way lower than your targeting reticle because you're freaking holding a minigun, it ain't exactly at your shoulder. Your grenade launcher? It's packed with cluster bombs. Your rocket launcher? The blast radius will mess you up. Your shotguns? Plan for reload times and know when to swap! Every gun sounds and feels good, every gun requires just enough thought which you must mold into instinct, and every enemy can be taken out with any one of them so long as you know what you're doing.
Hellbreaker had promise with the level editor, and that promise never materialized, but for what we do get at its price point, you're still gonna have a lot of fun blasting the crap out of anything and everything that moves. If you like old school FPS on Steam, drop a couple of bucks for this one. It's worth it for no frills mass combat.