Week 4!(?) A little late, I suppose but can you blame me? The year is basically over at the time of me writing this and people have been busy, myself included! I made a GotY list and I played some video games in between my family's standard holiday celebrations. I managed to finish a whopping 2 games in the past week and a half! Bringing my grand total amount of games finished this month to 16! Remember when your elementary school teacher/parents said you could do anything if you set your mind to it?

This is exactly what they were talking about.

Game 15: Project Temporality

Time to completion: 5 hours

Project Temporality was described to me as Portal but with clones instead of portals.

I realize now after playing it that it was not a literal comparison but rather, a reductive way of describing a game with another game. In Project Temporality you have 2 somewhat (but not really) novel abilities. You can rewind time as much as you want and you can make up to 11 different timelines, including the one you currently occupy.

Creating a new timeline will make a clone of yourself that will perform the actions you did before you created the new timeline. For example, if you walk on a switch and rewind to create a new timeline and walk onto the switch while you are free to do something else.

Speaking of switches, there sure are a lot of them in this game! Most of the puzzles consist of making clones and having them stand on switches. There's also other puzzle elements including: lasers, moving platforms, holographic keys and... that's about it actually.

Game's pretty short, there are only 14 levels. It's also pretty easy, I've played at least 2 puzzle games this month and this one is without a doubt, the easiest one. Although, there are plenty of bugs in this game that despite it's easiness made this game pretty frustrating. For starters, your character tends to get caught on a lot of invisible walls when you walk too close to any object or a ledge. It's a minor annoyance but it kinda sucks when you're trying to jump across a gap and you just stop moving mid-air because you jumped a little too late. Also, 20% of the time the game just doesn't recognize when you or a clone is stepping onto a switch, when a majority of your gameplay revolves around you doing a thing it should probably work when you try to do that thing.

This game's not bad but at $15 it's hard to recommend because you can do so much better for the same price. If it's on sale or something, go nuts!

Game 16: The Fall

Time to completion: 2.5 hours

I managed to play The Fall maybe a day before Giant Bomb put out their deliberations podcasts where they talk up (and really spoil) this gem of a game. I was hesitant to play it at first because I heard it was the first in a trilogy and I prefer to play episodic games once every part is out (which is the only thing keeping me from buying Kentucky Route Zero) but man, this game ends on such a strong note that I could not be more excited to see how this story continues. I was too caught up in the game to take any screenshots during so maybe you should just check out this quick look instead:

But wait, there's more!

I'm not gonna leave you hanging with just 2 games to talk about! I have been playing some other things, games you can't quite finish per say, let me tell ya about 'em!

Ultra Street Fighter IV

I looooooove fighting games. Even though I'm not particularly well at any of them, I'll still happily play any kind without hesitation. Skullgirls has been my go-to since it came out on PC and I haven't touched an iteration of SFIV since Arcade Edition in 2012(?). As it turns out, I got a lot better! My hours of casual Skullgirls play and tourney spectating has somehow allowed me to absorb some knowledge about the more subtle mechanics that I didn't even think I knew about. I mean, I'm still not great but being able to get through most of the trials with no trouble seems like progress to me!

Lethal League

I played the web version/prototype of Lethal League whenever that came out (I think it predates Reptile's first commercial game Megabyte Punch, for reference's sake) and I thought that was pretty cool. When I heard they were making an enhanced version I was stoked but I had no idea.

It looks just like the original, but a bit sharper and with more characters and it doesn't seem to suffer from what Divekick did when it added all of it's meta-mechanics. There are no match-ups to worry about, each character has their quirks but the differences aren't vast enough for someone who doesn't know what they are to be concerned about.

Maybe I say that with a bit of bias as someone who's seen so much of this game for the past 5 or so months but I feel like Lethal League just excels in almost every category. It plays so well, it does online the best out of all the new wave of local-multiplayer indie things. It's absolutely not perfect and it's straight up broken sometimes but when it works it's almost like you aren't playing it online.

Did I mention the soundtrack? It's pretty great. You should really listen to the soundtrack you guys. Seriously.