Yakuza: Like A Dragon is…uh. That’s just the (literal translation of) the Japanese series title. Was the Japanese version called Like A Dragon: Yakuza? Is this game Yakuza: Yakuza? Anyway, I like this series, so I don’t mind having another installment of it in my library.
Hi-Fi Rush is yet another installment in what is both my most and least favorite meta-genre of video games: The beautiful gem born of incredible talent and sincere passion that leads almost immediately to the studio being shut down. Get up on the pedestal with Bloodlines, you deserved it/were too good for this sinful Earth!
Steelrising is…a Soulslike about a clockwork automaton who helps the French Revolution fight against King Louis’ mecha-army? This sounds bizarre and wonderful and I absolutely want to try it.
Loddlenaut is about being a scuba diving janitor cleaning up an alien ocean from the pollution of a megacorporation. I could get behind this if it was a pretty game, where the gameplay is mainly an excuse to go through a location seeing what’s happened, but it’s not.
King of the Castle is a multiplayer party game. I don’t have a group to play these games with and don’t like playing with strangers, so it’s dead out the gate.
Bravery and Greed looks kinda cool but its ad copy is all over the place. It jumps right into explaining that it has classes with their own unique movesets that involve things like parries, dodges, and attacks. Then it has a header that tells me it has both PvP and PvE content, which is also where I learn that the plot of this game involves finding runes for the Sky Fortress. Sounds like an excuse MacGuffin hunt to frame the gameplay, which is fine, but weird that I found it buried in a description of its modes. Then it explains it has a skill system with some cool-sounding, thematic skill trees, but the next header is about how you can buy permanent upgrades with gold, so wait, is this a Roguelike? How Long To Beat says 6.5 hours to beat the main story but nearly 30 hours to beat the main story + extras. I usually gravitate towards the main story + extras length, so this is a huge time investment for something with a pretty confused pitch and which only musters up “huh, looks neat” even when it’s hitting hardest. I’ll pass.
Amanda the Adventurer is some kind of analogue horror thing. It looks absolutely hideous. They call it “classic 90s-style animation” but I watched Reboot and it looked way better than this. Anyway, it’s a puzzle game, and while it seems like the puzzles are mostly a vehicle for the horror, it also seems like it’s not the kind of horror I like. I like survival horror games, atmospheric horror games, the progeny of Silent Hill, mostly. This seems more like the offspring of creepypasta.
Mediterranea Inferno is a visual novel about three young men going on a road trip to Italy to recover from the trauma of the pandemic lockdowns. I know some people were genuinely, seriously negatively affected by the lockdowns, but also it’s become a fad in certain online spaces to pretend this was a universal experience and it very definitely wasn’t. So it’s possible that this game believably depicts people who actually did suffer trauma from prolonged near-total isolation, but it’s also possible that this game will try to convince me that being significantly inconvenienced is basically the same thing as trauma, and when I have over 150 games left in my backlog I do not feel like rolling those dice.
This month started really strong with three easy pick-ups and then fell off hard, but three pickups is still pretty good, so I’m not complaining.
Chamomile Has A Blog 