ITT I play every unplayed Steam Game in my library

[CaptainMeme]

See title

I have >100 games in my Steam library I've never opened, mainly due to Humble Bundles. Time to give them a go! I'm going to commit to playing 30min of each and documenting it here.

If anyone else wants to join in with this and document playing their own unplayed games, feel free


THE LIST: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

Current Recommendations (while there are recommendations, games will be selected from those. Anyone is free to recommend anything from the above list!)
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky

Fallout: New Vegas

(UP NEXT)
Star Wars: Republic Commando
Subnautica

[CaptainMeme]

Game #1:

Shadowgrounds

I decided I'm going to record my initial play of each to give me something to look back on too; it's fairly long so feel free to skip



I own Shadowgrounds because the developer made Nine Parchments, one of my favourite games of all time. After playing that I bought a bundle of their games, but the only game I tried out in that bundle was Trine and it didn't interest me much. Shadowgrounds was one of the games that just got completely missed as a result.

Looks like quite an old game! It's a top-down shooter, where you move the mouse left and right to rotate left/right and arrow keys to go forward, back, or strafe. I thought that was going to make controlling the character quite awkward, but they actually felt quite intuitive and I got the hang of it very quickly. It's quite difficult to miss with a lot of the monsters, because they're quite large, so that helped a bit too. Combat was quite simple, but fun; there's dodge-roll which feels good to use, your flashlight can be used to scare away smaller enemies but has limited battery (although the battery seems to last a very long time and recharges when you don't use it, so I found there wasn't really a reason not to just have it permanently on in combat), and there's a range of weapons which you unlock as you go. The basic pistol and the rifle didn't feel all that special, but I think that helped the shotgun feel great in comparison - it was quite a fun moment using it for the first time and just having the enemy be blasted backward by the force of it.

I having a feeling that the difficulty I played on, Normal, might stealthily make it difficult for you to die. You can lose health very quickly, but a lot of the times I was on low health I would somehow end up surviving without losing any more, despite not really changing my gameplay a ton. But honestly, I only really noticed how much stuff

should

have hit me when I was skimming through the video, and while I was playing it felt tense and exciting, so I'll give it a pass on this. I imagine you can turn up the difficulty if you don't want that, anyway.

Story was kind of interesting. It's nothing to write home about, at least as far as I got - facility on a moon base gets overrun by alien monsters coming out of the water - but the voice acting was generally good and added a fair bit. There's a lot of logs that give exposition hidden out of the way, which I'm always a fan of, but there was never anything unexpected in them. Maybe it gets better as the game goes on? I'm not sure.

Overall, thumbs up from me, and I think this might be one I come back to. The gameplay was fun, and I am kind of intrigued to see where the story goes!

[CaptainMeme]

Game #2:

Viking: Battle for Asgard

Tried to eliminate the background noise a bit in this one and ended up getting echo-y instead. One day I'll get it right.


I have no clue why I own this game. Given it's Creative Assembly, it must have been some Total War-related bundle. They're a company who make solid games!

Unfortunately, this is not one of them. It might get better later on, but it didn't leave me with any desire to play it further than the ~45min I played for.

It's an open-world RPG, one that seems to have been ported from the xbox 360 based on the control scheme and how ludricrous the keyboard mapping screen was (I ended up just using controller instead). The story is based around Norse mythology and they brought in Brian Blessed to narrate for them, which was one of the highlights.

Combat... Well, you have a light attack, which you can hit the same person consecutively a few times with, or a heavy attack, which needs to be charged to be effective but one charge of which can attack a few enemies in a row by 'bouncing' from one to the next. I think both attacks are designed to feel weighty, so they both begin fast - with a jump to the enemy you're attacking and a heavy swing - but end slow, with a second or so recovery time before you can do anything else. That recovery time really made the combat feel horrible, because when fighting multiple enemies I was quite often brutalised during this recovery time. A lot of other games with similar combat deal with this by having a dodge roll or parry you can use, giving you a response and making the combat feel faster, but neither was present here. You can unlock attack combos as you progress, so it's very possible this is just the mediocre baseline and it builds on top of it to make something playable, but as is it was not fun at all.

There

is

a block, which protects you at the cost of not being able to do anything else while you're blocking, and the block itself being slow to activate and slow to exit out of. The worst thing about it though? Some enemies can block too, and only a fully charged heavy attack can break said block. Since an attack interrupts the windup on a heavy attack, if you're fighting multiple enemies, you'll need to ignore the ones with shields until you've dealt with the others. And that's difficult, because it has arkham-style lockons that send your attacks into random enemies in the group!

The absolute worst thing about this though is how poor it is at teaching you things. The aforementioned block, I did not discover until ~30mins in when I had already died several times. Your

upward

jump is pathetic, but if you jump forward across a gap your character suddenly has springs for legs, which is never told to you and which you can only find out by actively throwing yourself to your apparent death. There's also a parkour puzzle at one point which requires you to climb vines, which the game never tells you are climbable and which are barely visible, so I ended up throwing myself to my death several times before figuring out what you were actually supposed to do.

Big thumbs down from me! Maybe it's just because I'm a scrub at combat like this, but this one didn't catch my interest at all.

[CaptainMeme]

Game #3:

Thea: The Awakening

Fun story behind my owning this game; my sister is called Thea and one time we just all decided to search our names in the steam store. This game came up and it's been something of a meme between myself and my siblings ever since, and when it went on sale for a bit I picked it up as a result. Never got around to playing it until now.

Thea: The Awakening is a turn-based strategy game, and comes with all the complexity you expect in turn-based strategy games plus a little more. I was still in the tutorial after an hour of play. That didn't turn out to be much of a problem, because it was integrated well into the campaign, but I feel there was still quite a lot to learn about that I didn't get around to.

The mechanics themselves are fairly intuitive; assign villagers to gather resources, use resources to craft things, send out parties of villagers to explore/fight enemies/obtain rewards. Where this game deviates from the standard formula is in the combat, which is a card game where you 'play' your villagers as either Attack cards (standard attack/defence minions) or Tactics cards (special abilities). It wasn't too difficult to get the hang of the mechanics, but god, those fights were difficult. I lost twice in the tutorial! A little embarrassing Quite fun though.

Sometimes fights are triggered by events, and you can decide to have a 'Social Challenge' or a 'Hunting Challenge' or a bunch of others depending on the situation. Your villagers have a ton of different stats, and the main thing different challenges seem to change is which stats are used for the fight, although some of them also change what kind of enemies you'll be fighting. These are even more difficult, despite the game telling you they're easier!

Overall though, I enjoyed this game. I like turn-based strategy, and the card game was a fun diversion from the usual combat of those games. Voice acting was quite fun too. Thumbs up!

[CaptainMeme]

I've made a list of all the eligible games here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

Feel free to shoot me a recommendation or two if there's one in particular anyone wants me to play! Otherwise I'll keep picking at random

[CaptainMeme]

Thanks! I know nothing about steins;gate, so this is really helpful.

I'll go with Elite given this is kinda a first impressions thing so getting into it more quickly would be helpful. I have a feeling VNs aren't going to work particularly well with this whole 30min to an hour thing, but I'll probably go play it outside of that anyway if it seems at all interesting since things like Danganronpa and Zero Escape hooked me immediately and I'd assume these are similar.

[CaptainMeme]

Game #4:

Metro 2033 Redux

I own this game because it's one of my brother's favourites, but it's never looked like my kind of thing. Never tried it before though, so I guess this was time to put that to the test!

Metro 2033 is a post-apocalyptic First Person Shooter/Horror game, but more survival-focused than the likes of Call of Duty. There are a couple of different options on how to play, but I chose the one from the original Metro 2033, which limits ammunition and encourages stealth. That may have been a mistake. I'm not great at aiming in FPS games, and this one makes it much more difficult with significant recoil and long reload times. It's seriously brutal, and even on the lowest difficulty I died a few times.

There's a fair amount of exposition, which is a benefit. There are large segments of the game where you are just wandering around the living quarters, and basically every person there has a voice line for you if you walk up and stare at them. I quite enjoyed these parts, even though I didn't spend a great deal of time on them. If it wasn't a quick first impressions thing where I felt I needed to get to the gameplay, I would have probably gone up to absolutely everyone.

The world wasn't

massively

fleshed out in the time I played for, but there was enough of a backstory for it to feel engaging. The actual combat, though, fell a bit flat for me. It was clear that the monsters were supposed to be terrifying, but the comically large numbers of them, which would then approach and attack one at a time while the others sort of just hung back and enjoyed the show, took away a fair bit of the intensity. The graphics also hadn't aged well, which didn't help. Overall, it led to a situation where the factors that are supposed to make the game feel like a horror game - the lack of ammo, the difficulty of fighting - just made it feel frustrating, especially since stealth wasn't usually an option at least as far as I played. The best way to deal with enemies tended to be rushing up to them with a shotgun, which certainly wasn't the experience I was expecting and didn't really mesh well with the atmosphere.

Personally, I could see why people who like this kind of game would like this one - it's a challenging game with a solid backdrop - but it's a thumbs down for me personally. Honestly with my attitude toward FPS games it would be very difficult for any to get a thumbs up, so I wouldn't treat my opinion on this with too much weight. It probably comes from annoyance at my own inability to aim!

[CaptainMeme]

Game #5:

Long Live The Queen

I own Long Live The Queen because Xofelf recommended it to me way back when! Like a lot of these, I just never found the time to get to it. I have to admit, I was a little uneasy about it at first based on the header - I'm not really a fan of the lewdness in a lot of anime-style games, especially one that markets itself as being about a 14-year-old. Thankfully this game never approaches that, at least as far as I played to, and didn't seem likely to go there in future.

I loved playing this game. It's exactly my thing. It's basically a visual novel with choice-based gameplay, except with two extra mechanics - a system of emotions you can do various things to increase/decrease, and school classes you can choose between to level up various skills. How much those skills level up is based on your emotions, which adds a bit extra to the decisionmaking by limiting your choice or by making it so that the obvious thing to level wouldn't be as effective as something else that *might* be useful or might not. I'd imagine it's much easier to skillfully navigate this and raise/lower emotions to allow yourself to train different things once you're familiar with the game, but even not knowing how anything was affecting anything else it was still engaging and led to some interesting choices.

There's a constant threat of death, brought to the forefront by the medieval setting, your character's inexperience at ruling, and the fact a snake is set on you very early in the game. It makes every encounter just a little tense, especially when you see the inevitable bubble:

"I love that everyone is enjoying the party!"

SENSE MAGIC FAILED

"My aunt took my cousin home after the snake attack... Ah well, I'm sure she'll be fine."

POISON KNOWLEDGE FAILED

Speaking of those bubbles... They appear all. the. time. And it's usually a fun moment, because it leaves you wondering 'oh god what's about to happen' and also 'hm, I wonder if I could trigger the correct response on other run by training X skill'. The writing is solid, although there were far too many characters for me to remember who was who (this might improve with replays).

It's a very simplistic game, but it was a blast regardless. This is one I'll definitely come back to. Thumbs up!

[CaptainMeme]

Game #6:

Pyschonauts

I'm not sure why I own this game, and I had no idea what it was prior to playing it, aside from people telling me it was quite good.

I was quite happy to learn that it's an old-school 3D platformer! Opinions will always be divided on these, but I played a lot of these growing up and they hold a great deal of nostalgia for me. It did have the issues one would expect from an old game of this kind - I think it's probably best played with controller, but I couldn't get my controller to work with it, and it only 'unlocked' the options menu after the first few cutscenes and an intro tutorial bit which meant I had to play the start in incredibly low resolution with basically zero mouse sensitivity. But I was able to fix the options menu issues once it unlocked and it generally ran well after that (although the cutscenes were much lower resolution than the rest of the game).

The story is... weird. The whole thing seems to be based on the same kind of weirdness games like Bugsnax present - in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the two games were made by the same people? They seemed quite similar. It was intriguing and got me hooked, which was the important part, and the platforming itself was generally quite fun outside of a couple of annoying bits of jankiness. It seems to be something of a collectathon, and being the obsessive person I am I took that to the extreme and attempted to collect everything first time through - there were literally hundreds of collectable 'figments' through the level but a lot of them were just out in the open, so it wasn't massively difficult and was quite fun at least at this early stage.

There were clearly a bunch of mechanics that were going to be added in later that I didn't get to, but the platforming itself was fun enough that it was great to play through regardless, and I'd definitely play this one further. Thumbs up!

[CaptainMeme]

That's probably it, yep And you should try running it, it's an older game so might work on an older computer?

[CaptainMeme]

Fair warning, there are missables in psychonauts.

Ugh. Never like games having missables. But I guess it's probably just because 100%ing isn't really what you're supposed to do? There was never an 'x things to find' counter or anything, so maybe I just misjudged it on that part.

[CaptainMeme]

Game #7:

Factorio

Factorio was something I got in sort of a mystery game trade. Myself and a friend both gave one another a game we thought the other would enjoy, I gave him Civ 5 and got Factorio. I think both of us had way too much going on at the time though so neither ever got played; glad to finally get to it!

I went in kind of knowing that it was about crafting and mechanising things, but I didn't know any of the specifics. Was very surprised to find enemies in the game, because I thought it would just be a sandbox! I'm very glad they were there though, I think it added a fair bit. I didn't get all that far in the game - I finished the third mission of five in the tutorial - and I'm fairly sure it gets a lot more complex further on, but as far as I got it was about mining resources, and crafting things with those resources to a) defend yourself and b) automate the resource gathering.

It's a slow game, but an extremely satisfying one. Even at the early stage I was at, putting together everything into a big chain - the mining rigs, the conveyer belts, the weird arm things that would take the resources off the conveyer belts and stick them in the smelter - felt great to sit back and watch afterward. Although there was always

something

you'd have to do manually, usually moving coal from one location to another or taking resources out of the smelters. Wasn't really a point against it because it meant there was reason to still actually play! And I'd imagine these become automatable later on, once you've found more stuff to do.

Fun moment at 34:26 in the video when the enemies show up and I don't have enough ammo to deal with them, so had to leg it around the base trying to craft ammunition while being attacked. I'm not sure what you're supposed to do in this situation if you don't have spare resources, you might just die?

Anyway, thumbs up. Even though it was slow, I really enjoyed it. I hear it's multiplayer too - this is absolutely something I'd play multiplayer.

[CaptainMeme]

By the way have you ever played Fallout 3? 4?

Nope! I know a bit about them because my brother is a big fan, but I've never played any fallout game myself.

[CaptainMeme]

psychonauts is a pretty fun game, I even have one of the harder achievements on my profile wall of hard achievements

...although I just checked and apparently 13% of people who played the game also have that achievement so I guess it wasn't as hard as I thought.

Factorio is one of my favorite games ever so I hope you enjoy that too.

Congrats! I assume that's a bonus level?

[CaptainMeme]

Game #8:

Steins;Gate ELITE

Fun story as to why I own this game, I saw it on sale and thought I remembered a friend recommending it to me, so I picked it up. I then went and told said friend, and they told they'd actually recommended another game called Code:Vein and had no idea what Steins;Gate was. So I went into this completely blind, aside from knowing that it was a VN and having the advice from Pie about going with ELITE rather than just Steins;Gate.

First things first, it's a Visual Novel, so it's long. I usually allocate ~1h for these first impressions, and in this game that was enough to get through the Prologue. As far as I saw, there were no game mechanics, it was just pure Visual Novel - I'm not sure if this changes later. The way the story was talking about butterfly effect makes me think it will likely just be choice-based gameplay, which is honestly fine if the story is good enough.

The Prologue was pretty much entirely about fleshing out the main character. It was... confusing, but amusing. Your character initially seems like a secret agent of some sort trying to fight against 'The Organisation' but as you progress, it becomes more and more evident that the Organisation doesn't really exist and he's making stuff up as he goes along. It very much struck a chord with me, as someone who spent the last month or so pretending to be a secret agent fighting ALPHA-SEVEN in a Survivor game; it was exactly the same style of silliness. The weird part is that there are a few serious things happening in the background here - it's heavily indicated that time travel is occuring, and someone who says they've met you when you've never met them promptly gets murdered.

It's intriguing. I'm very interested to see how this goofball ends up reacting to a serious situation.

I don't think I've played enough of it to give it a proper review, but I'm going to play more, so I think that warrants a thumbs up!

[CaptainMeme]

Fallout will be tomorrow! Have slacked off a bit on this

In the meantime, have this very exciting speedrun:

[CaptainMeme]

Game #9:

Fallout: New Vegas

I know a little about Fallout because, well, who doesn't? But I've never played a fallout game and wasn't even aware I owned one before I started doing this. It's a post-apocalyptic RPG/first person shooter, which has probably been the main reason I've tended to shy away from the series - as I've mentioned before, FPS is very rarely my kind of thing.

So. I think there's a certain kind of game that it's just really difficult to get a good overview of in the ~1h that I allocate for these, and this is absolutely one of them. RPGs in general, to be honest. I skipped a good amount of tutorial stuff to try to get further into the game, but I don't think I actually got to anything more than I would have otherwise, so that was a little pointless! Still, I got a chance to wander around the starting village a bit, turn on the radio, start doing a couple of quests, wander out into the wilderness, almost get blown up, find a fun-looking town and crash the game. I'll get back to that last one.

The backdrop is good and the setup of factions seems interesting, although it didn't really get expanded upon in the time I played for. It's got what you would expect from an RPG in tons and tons of possible conversations, and I'm the kind of person who really enjoys clicking through all of them and listening to everything, so it's something I appreciate (or would, if I wasn't trying to rush through the intro section). There was a stats system, and the effect it had in conversations was very obviously highlighted, with the game outright telling you what stats you needed to level to make certain things happen - that was pretty helpful!

The combat felt... off. I'd line up what I was certain was a direct hit, and it would somehow miss. I assume that maybe you have a certain chance of missing no matter how good your aim is, and I absolutely hate that in games. I'm bad enough at FPS games as is, when I finally manage to line up a shot correctly I want to be rewarded for it goddammit. It ended up at a point where I was either using the auto-targeting system (which was nice, but always had at least a 5% chance of missing and felt very unnatural to use) or charging at enemies with a razor blade. I'll admit, attacking with the razor blade was quite satisfying, but probably wouldn't work against the game's harder enemies.

Finally - when I told my brother I was playing this one, his response was 'good luck getting an hour in without it crashing'. I made it about fifty minutes before it crashed seemingly for no reason. Not a great look, and depending on how far back that sets you it might be a pretty hefty loss of progress. If it crashes so often that my brother was fairly sure it would crash within

an hour

of the start, that's always going to be massive points against it.

An interesting game by the looks of it, and I can see why people like it, but it's not one I'll be going back to. It felt very much like an Elder Scrolls game but much less suited to me; in fact, playing it just made me think about how much I'd rather be playing Skyrim.

[CaptainMeme]

So, I definitely liked VATS more than the usual combat. I also think the dislike for it was a bit more about getting in my own head than the game itself?

Like, it's there as an additional thing on top of the standard FPS combat. The aesthetic does a great job of integrating it into the world, but moving from standard shooting to pausing the world and just clicking felt very odd, and since it's so much easier than the main combat it felt a little like a tacked-on cheat mechanism. Which I know isn't true, it's a mechanic I assume they included for good reason, but once that thought was in my head it felt bad to use it. I'd have been much happier if it was just VATS or just FPS, or if you could select which way you wanted to play at the outset, although I realise that just VATS probably doesn't work too well in an open world game like this.