Games added: The Knight Witch
Last week: Finished The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe, finished WITH Horace, played The Knight Witch & probably dabbled with some others
This week: Probably more KW, and thinking about starting Octopath 2.
While I'm not going to say I got EVERY possible ending in TSP, I got quite a few of them and feel content enough to move on. It's an interesting game - the $12 or so I paid for my physical copy is probably about right, maybe a touch high. It was amusing, but it's definitely not something you'll ever revisit once you're done with it. Worth playing to see what the fuss was about if for no other reason, and you'll get more out of it if you enjoy a good bit of meta in your games and don't mind what's basically a short walking sim that you're expected to replay multiple times.
Horace sure did start out promising. I really would have liked to have finished the game it was in the first couple of chapters. But then it became something else...one of those very precise brutal 2D platforming games, to be specific. It was pretty jarring how sudden the switch was from "this is some interesting puzzle-platforming that makes you think while telling a good story" to "OK, this is just one nasty platforming room after another that requires very precise timing." Not for me. To add to that, this is another game that was advertised as a "MetroidVania" that 1000% *IS NOT*. The whole purpose of genres is so you can help describe a game to someone, and they'll know if it's the kind of thing they're looking for or not. If you just slap a genre label on everything that sorta-kinda-not-really resembles whatever it is, then they're pointless. There is almost no exploration to be had in this game outside of very minor "choose which door you want to go in first in the hub area" type stuff. You get in a area and progress linearly through room after room until you reach the end. There do appear to be some things you'll need to come back for later on, but that alone does NOT a sidesplorer make.
What IS a sidesplorer, however, is The Knight Witch. I did something I haven't done in a few months now, I swung by Gamestop to see what they had. And they actually had several quircky games on the Switch that I had either been eyeing or that I just plain had never heard of before but looked interesting. I settled on The Knight Witch because I had been interested in it, it has a gorgeous art style, and I had heard it was a sidesplorer. I'm happy to report that it is - it's a shoot-em-up sidesplorer, specifically, which is a pretty cool twist. I'm still early in, so no real judgements yet, but it's tough but fun/fair so far, and if the difficulty does get out of hand for me I'm pretty sure I saw a setting that will remedy that. Will report back later.
The Octopath 0 announcement, along with you guys talking up 2 recently, has gotten me wanting to play one of the games. I saw J's post in the last thread replying to me and I also saw a YouTube video that basically said start with 2, so that's what I'm going to do.
