PixlBit

Good day pixlbiters.

After a long summer drought of games suddenly I had everything to play, so this is gonna be quite a long post. Bare with me as I jump into this pile.

I finished the main quest line of Dragon Quest Builders 2. I have been meaning to platinum the game but other things have taken my time. 

Knights & Bikes came out after a successful Kickstarter. Unfortunately, they had next to no PR from their publisher and thus barely got any coverage. It might be the most complete Kickstarter I ever backed and is delightful. The gameplay itself is just all right, but the atmosphere, presentation, and creativity involved in the title is top-notch. Best played in Co-op for the ultimate experience. Knights and Bikes PS4 Review

Mutazione is a narrative game with gardening, drumming, and drama, and it’s delightful and heartfelt with a similar vibe to Knights & Bikes. The art style is superb and it has amazing animation and its extremely solid. It’s wonderful and you should check it out.

One more dilapidated island adventure is Concrete Genie. This one I HAVE platinumed. It’s a short adventure game with excellent style, more drama and emotion, and awesome monsters that you paint. 

So, as follows: All 3 games have sad islands in need of help. All have teen protagonists. All have unique graphical styles. One has bikes, one has gardening, one has painting. All are worth your time.

Another game that’s more of an experience is Sayonara Wild Hearts, which is an arcade rhythm-runner album with the strangest trophy list I’ve ever seen. 

Now on to the Metroidvania’s. Blasphemous is a dark journey through pixel corrupted inquisition-era Catholic imagery. It’s pretty good, with a few problems in the controls not being as tight as I want it. I need to go back and finish it, I was pretty deep into the game.

Another crowdfunded project Indivisible came out and I’m less than impressed with that as a final product. It’s missing several characters which should be in the game and it’s a pretty straightforward experience. The gameplay loop is mostly smashing buttons, with no real other items, despite the developers pointing at Valkyrie Profile as their inspiration. The storyline is pretty generic despite the underused Southeast Asian setting. I’m waiting for a few more updates before I get back to it.

My current rogue-lite is Children of Morta which has a stunning pixel-art style and an excellent gameplay loop where you can take various family members on a quest to save their world. It has excellent world-building and tight gameplay and it’s great.

I forgot an island! Greedfall. I put the game down and need to pick it back up. It’s all right, it scratches that Bioware itch in a low rent sort of way. It provides more than a few ways to accomplish quests, has good voice acting and some lovely environments. 

Furthering the exploration of strange, new lands....

The Outer Wilds came out on PS4 and I knew next to nothing about it before I purchased it. I think my brain conflated it with Sunless Seas or something. Outer Wilds is sorta brilliant and is scratching the same itch Heaven’s Vault did. It’s that ‘there’s a mystery here, what is going on.... oh god, is that what’s going on?’ vibe that makes you feel smart. It’s cool, you should play it.

The Outer Worlds came out on PS4 and I knew a lot about this before I purchased it. It’s space Fallout. You have quirky characters living in a fucked-up society and you shoot monsters in the skull and make tough decisions with whip-smart dialog. 

I... I think that’s everything I’ve been playing that’s new? Have I forgotten anything... hmm. I wanted to pick up Eastward for PS4 but I’ll pick it up later.

Also, I linked my PSN account to my Twitch account and I occasionally stream, sans commentary of any sort and don’t have it set to archive more than whatever the free storage is. https://www.twitch.tv/sonicbug99

 

So.... whatcha been playing?