Remnant II has dropped the “From the Ashes” subtitle. I feel like I heard a lot about Remnant: From the Ashes, but I have retained none of it. It’s not in my Steam library or on the wishlist, not that the wishlist has seen an update in years since I started focusing on the backlog. Both From the Ashes and Remnant II are under 20 hours, which I, with some trepidation, have decided is short enough to try just on the grounds of its strong aesthetics alone, but this is another one of those where I’m setting a hair-trigger to kick it into Regrets because I’m kind of on the border of whether or not I care enough to play it to completion, so it had better hook me fast.
Persona 5 Strikers gets in on the grounds that I’ll try basically anything related to Persona. It’s getting in on the same “but I’ll kick it to Regrets at the first sign of trouble” condition as a lot of games have gotten in lately, though, because this is a spin-off and sometimes spin-offs are garbage.
Jusant is an “action-puzzle climbing game” and I do not see myself enjoying the sub-genre they’re trying to carve out there.
Domekeeper is a Roguelike. It’s some kind of mining-and-defense Roguelike, and if I were looking for new Roguelikes this one would be a frontrunner, but I am aggressively not looking for new Roguelikes.
Jack Move is a cyberpunk JRPG that seems…fine, I guess? It’s only 6 hours long, which would normally be short enough for me to shrug my shoulders and roll with it, but somehow nothing about this game is hooking me.
I’m redeeming the code for Station to Station but not adding it to the backlog. It’s a puzzle game where you connect trains together, focused on chill vibes and voxel graphics, and that’s the kind of thing where I might play a round or two of it between bouts of work or while listening to a podcast, but which I probably won’t care to see through to completion. How Long To Beat does say it’s only a 10 hour game, though, which suggests it’s beatable and not even that long, but if this ends up being a Mini Metro thing where “beaten” just means “every level unlocked,” then I might happen to get there eventually but I’m not going to worry about whether or not I do. Although that does mean this could be one of the games that jumps directly into Complete without ever even being in the backlog.
Remnant Records looks like someone did what I always wanted Phasmophobia to do: Make a spooky ghost investigation game in which you actually exorcise the ghost, not just identify it. Phasmophobia’s setup isn’t as dumb as it seems at first glance, the idea is that there’s an exorcism team that goes in after you finish to solve the problem, and if you gave them the wrong type of ghost, they’ll notice because the exorcism is different for different types. But that still means you aren’t there for the exciting climax where the ghost is defeated. Like Phasmophobia, the ghosts are procedurally generated and it’s not clear that it’s possible to actually beat this game (the game is in the How Long To Beat database, but has 0 completions, so that’s no help), so I’m not sure if this is something like Station to Station where I’ll play it but not worry about completing it. I’m putting it in the backlog provisionally, but it might end up getting out of the backlog without going to Complete or Regrets on the grounds that I misunderstood whether or not it could be completed.
EDIT: And after finishing writing this, I went to actually redeem the key, and the keys are exhausted for this project. This is supposed to be a temporary issue, but bear in mind I’m rolling in six months after the fact. Considering no one’s registered a completion on How Long To Beat, I wonder if anyone successfully redeemed this game. Maybe it’s haunted.
McPixel 3 is a WarioWare-esque game of smaller games. I don’t think they’re full on six-second microgames the way WarioWare’s are, but there’s no consistent throughline to the gameplay, just a string of self-contained minigames each lasting, I would guess, 2-5 minutes. How Long To Beat says it’s about 5 hours long, which is exactly short enough for me to give this thing a chance.
EDIT: I gave it a chance. I’m not really vibing with the game’s sense of humor, nor with the way nearly every minigame is an adventure game puzzle where you rub a thing on another thing. They’re having fun with it, at least, embracing the insanity by having the solutions often be stupid and encouraging you to discover every possible animation and ending by keeping track of every interaction you’ve discovered in a scene. It’s adventure game moon logic bullshit, but that’s the joke. The problem is that the jokes are only funny maybe half the time and I still have to play adventure game bullshit to advance.
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