Finished HROT. It’s a good game, like I said last week, it’s basically Quake. I started on the Hard difficulty, played through the first episode, but turned it down for the others, because I wanted more run-and-gun and not creeping around corners, because enemies kill me in two shots.

Then I also played through Animal Well. A great looking metroidvania, where you don’t fight, it’s more about avoiding enemies or scaring them away. I saw credits after less than six hours, but then spend another eight searching for secrets. I needed help from a guide for the last couple, to get to the credits the second time, for the second ending. There’s some more stuff to find, maybe a third or true ending, but I don’t really care enough to do that.

I also decided to check out Rain World, but I’m not really sure about this one. For some reason, the game resolution is 768p, which scales with nothing. This means, unless you play on a cheap or old laptop, that uses that resolution, the game will be blurry (or a tiny window). There isn’t even a x2 scaling option or something. Luckily there is a mod fixes this, but it’s still baffling, that this is even needed. Like Animal Well, it’s also a game, where fighting isn’t really the focus (although you can to some extent), but most of the time I was fighting the controls. I’ll give it a bit more time next week, but unless it suddenly clicks with me, I’ll skip this one.

Since I’m in the mood for some metroidvanias right now, I played through another one, Haiku, the Robot. It’s a pretty cookie cutter medroidvania, not bad, but also doesn’t do anything special. You find abilities, like a double jump, short teleport, morphball, stuff like that. There’s also a system like the Charms in Hollow Knight to enhance certain parts of your skill set. I usually like pixel art graphics, but I really didn’t vibe with the enemy design, and everything else is once again pretty basic.

Earlier in the week I started Remnant II with a friend, but the beginning was really rough, so much so, that I don’t know if we’ll continue. The levels and bosses are randomized to some extent, so depending on your luck you might get easier or harder bosses. Our first boss (or event) was pretty terrible. We had to run down a tower, while we were chased by lighting (but also couldn’t be too fast, because of more lightning), and had to shoot some stuff in the middle of the tower, all while enemies spawned. The worst part about this “boss” was that basically everything, except the enemies, was a one-shot death. I was terrible at this and constantly failed, but we eventually made it through. The next couple of bosses were better, but not by much. Who knows if we’ll ever get back to this one.

Then the same friend and me started a coop Baldurs Gate 3 run today. I guess we’re doing an evil run, since he picked Dark Urge and we’re going to raid the grove next time. I played through the game once, around the time of the 1.0 release, and wanted to do an evil playthrough anyway eventually, so this is fine with me.