April (28th) being the birthday marks the milestone of being a year closer to never getting to play some of the games in the backlog. Each year I told myself to start clearing and continued to buy more and unfortunately this year was no different but the wish list has gotten smaller and another game fell from the BD18 list. I realized the last two months posts shared a same number so I mistyped in February or March, for continuity purposes from here on out it will BD?? (Bean Dive and the number of games left at that point)
Recap: The first month since last September I hadn't played or finished an AC game. Which also means I'm still avoiding Masteries/Forgotten Saga and both BF multiplayer grinds.
I started off the month still addicted to Cult of the Lamb so I finished that minus Woolhaven. I'll call it a completion for now til I buy it since when I do I'll play and finish it. What a fun little game from a genre I'm not a huge fan of.
Then instead of picking up where I had left off I started a new game in an attempt to speed run Monkey Island 2 (a BD84) and get all achievements in one run, it was saved at the beginning of Chapter 2 and that is where it is still at. I loved these two games on my old Gateway but I just don't like point and click games anymore.
I picked Vampyr back up, I noticed in the menus (and in my eyes) I had embraced someone so I just set it up to harvest every single person in one night and go for a supposedly complicated final boss fight. Only took a couple tries, I immediately ran it back, speed running (for me, by no means was speed involved, this took me a couple days) a no kill run for the last achievement.
Wanting something different in climbed Tiny BookShop on Game Pass. Played the hell out of this only to realize it had the broken achievement and I hadn't done enough beach days to knock out all the stamps in the first two years so had to play another entire unnecessary year. Read up on those if you're just starting the game, stamps require certain locations and some are seasonal so if you don't get them done in time it's just an extra headache. Saw an update for the game later in the month and since it still didn't fix the achievement, I made a post here on reddit. The morning of the 23rd the dev replied saying it should be fixed with the update that had just come out and sure enough it was. My first, first completion on TA, by luck of being up way too early one morning and happening to see their message first thing.
Two wishlisted games got bought and completed around the 20th. Night Book and Still Wakes the Deep. Thoroughly enjoyed Still Wakes the Deep and it's DLC. Night Book was a letdown in comparison to The Complex for me. I wish I had bought something else instead.
Next up was Metro 2033 Redux, a BD84, I really enjoyed this game. Holds up surprisingly well for it's age. I ran back to back playthroughs, a stealthy/everything easy mode (spartan?) and then a run/gun/run and run some more maybe 8-10 hour run through on the harder mode required that was supposed to be tougher/less pickups. I honestly saw where a lot of people said they ran out of filters and I never once even came close, like 13 minutes left I think was the lowest I ever saw. The last couple chapters I had 800+ military ammo so everything got shot with the burning ammo. My only issue was getting too far ahead in the little "tunnel" area heading to the tower, I had ran too far ahead, I was stuck in a loop where your comrade wouldn't trigger to run and help you up and if I went back to try and trigger him I got a mutant mauled to death screen, I tried to replay the last chapter and ran into the same issue again but this time he had gone past the trigger and I would get killed as soon as I got to where he was. Third time was a charm, just stayed immediately behind him. 83 more to go!
I had three late month guilty pleasure additions yesterday thanks to the gamerscore article. Both DPS Idle 2s and the Puzzle Galaxy. Thanks to the glitch in the originals Xbox version where the game had to basically stay running or hit a 10 hour time limit where it stopped gaining DPS Idle is my #1 "played" game on Xbox according to tracked stats. It was absolutely a guilty pleasure trying to get as far as I could on it's broken systems. The grind eventually became too much. I will put some hours into it's sequel for sure. As for Puzzle Galaxy, come on Onyx Lute, Steam already has Glass Masquerade 4, why hasn't 3 been ported yet?! This sort of scratched that itch and even though I've done all the achievements. I'll be getting check marks next to all the available puzzles eventually. This will be my tune out game for a few months.
TL;DR Somehow another month above water, 3 games started but 6 completed including all 3 started! (As I've been doing for the entirety of this mini blog series, easy gamerscore/quick completions are excluded so the above 3 games are not included in the numbers) -5 games for the year now.