Previously on Logging The Backlog...
Logging The Backlog: February 2023
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Finishing Up 2022: Part 2 - Lil Backlog Blog
Soooo... during last month's blog, I barely made any progress in clearing games off my backlog, having only finished one game in Horizon Forbidden West. And this month, with the rush to buy up games before the Wii U and 3DS eShops shut down for good, I've actually made negative progress. For the first time, I've added more games to my list than I was able to remove this month, making this already ridiculous task even more daunting. But hey, at least I finished more than one game this month.
Games Left
469 482
What I Played
Soul Hacker 2 - 3/5 - I wasn't super into this game when it was first announced. If I needed any further proof that I'm becoming a cranky old man, it's the incredibly petty complaints I had upon reveal. "Why are they taking the Shin Megami Tensei branding off the name? All these characters look boring. The characters in Soul Hackers 1 looked way cooler. Take me back to the 90s!". After getting my hands on it, I still kind of feel that way. It's just one of the more boring SMT games I've played. The story and the characters didn't really grab me. It's very much a "stop the humans who are trying to summon a god to end the world". There's not much going on outside of that, and the game doesn't really explore any of its themes too deeply. What is interesting is that it does seem to be a much shorter game if you just want to mainline the story and not invest 60 hours into an RPG. The game is sort of broken up into the main story dungeons and a separate side dungeon where you get some additional backstory for your party members and where you can do some level grinding. I don't know how viable just mainlining the game actually is though. I don't think the game scales the enemies to your level, so I wonder if you did just mainline the story dungeons, if you'd actually be strong enough to get through them.
Frogun - 3/5 - I kind of waffled back and forth about whether to score this a 2/5 instead. This game looks fantastic. It's super cute, and it's got that kind of sharp, high-fidelity version of "what you remember a PS1 era platformer looked like" to it, instead of just the mess of what a PS1 game actually looked like. Its core mechanic is that you have a frog shaped gun that doubles as a grappling hook used to platform through the levels. It's a fun time early on, but the game gets increasingly frustrating as you get further in. Your grappling hook only fires horizontally, straight ahead of you. As the game progresses it starts to require more use of your hook while you're in the air, and trying to line up your shot with a platform that's on a different vertical plane than you are becomes difficult. There are also these sort of zig-zag shots where you have to shot yourself in one direction, then very quickly jerk the camera 90 degrees in another direction to platform across other object midair. It all just requires a combination of platforming, aiming, shooting, and camera moving that just seems more than the game is capable of handling in a way that feels fair.
Dragon Caffi - 3/5 - Dragon Caffi kind of fills a similar spot that the Atelier series of game kind of filled for me. It's kind of monotonous, but in a cute and relaxing way that I kind of just like to chill out to. It's a game that is basically just all side quest. There's not really any plot to speak of. Your job is to collect 100 tokens from each of the game's NPCs. You do so by completing some sort of small quest for them, usually a fetch quest of some sort, and they reward you with a recipe for some sort of bake good. You then take that recipe back to your shop, gather the required ingredients needed and complete a simple rhythm game to bake it. You then return to the character that gave you that recipe, give them the bake good, and you get a token. Then you just do that 99 more times. The weirdest is thing though is the game kind of just doesn't have an ending. Once you get 100 tokens, you use them to ride this sky tram thing, to what I think is some sort of sky city, but you never see that part. When you turn in the tokens you get the whole "Are you sure you want to go? This is the end of the game" spiel, but after you say "yes", the game just goes "okay" and rolls straight into credits. No scene of you getting on the ship and taking off to wherever you're going or anything. The game just ends. It's really hard to recommended to any normal person, but the core loop and chill vibe is just something that makes my werido brain feel nice.
Lil Gator Game - 5/5 - Lil Gator Game just absolutely nails what it's going for. It's essentially Breath of the Wild, but from a smaller team, on a smaller scale. You play as a little alligator trying to set up a larp game for their older sister and are recruiting friends to try and help by completing quests for them. The writing is all very cute and silly, and none of it ever overstays it's welcome. Much like Frogun, it looks fantastic in that "if Breath of the Wild was an ideal image of a PS1 game". It's just a pure fun time that I didn't have a single complaint about playing.
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Next on Logging the Backlog...
Logging The Backlog: 2023 Year End Review
Ranking The Log
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