The month of January felt surprisingly long. I honestly don’t remember when was the last time I played these many games and wasn’t just puttering for 10 minutes in each one.
On the other hand this wasn’t exactly planned. It was just my usual case of ADD kicking in and going “Oh, yeah, there is that game I used to play. I guess I will play it again for a little bit…”
Whatever the case may be I don’t have any regrets about what I played this month!
No Man’s Sky
The month began with the fourth, and so far, last Expedition Redux in No Man’s Sky. Just like I expected it was kind of a pain. It started with an extreme hazard planet plus some other confusing parts in the beginning then some later steps being a bit annoying to do.
Despite that it was fun to participate in and it didn’t take too long. Now I am wondering if and when Hello Games will make a new expedition. I am guessing they will since there were some content added after their last expedition event and they could make one just to highlight those.
Whatever the case may be I am putting this game off to the side for now, as I got my fill for it. But I will definitely be getting back to it, with a normal game, in the future!
Final Fantasy XIV
After finishing Endwalker, I was happily catching up on… well, pretty much everything I have been neglecting for the last few years. But to the surprise of no one I got distracted by another game and took a break from FFXIV again… /sigh
I did at least manage to do the New Year’s event and the Halloween one. Yes, that is not a mistake, we did have a Halloween event in January. I don’t know the details but we didn’t have one last year so it got delayed to this month.
One terrible habit I need to change is to do those events last minute so I don’t feel the need to rush through them as much. Thankfully events in Final Fantasy XIV are very short and easy so I managed to complete them with all of my characters.
I also intend to play a bit more of Final Fantasy XIV soon. It will be another one of my attempts to have a more mixed gameplay schedule instead of focusing on one game to the exclusion of everything else. My thinking is that if I can get steady, small progress in different games I won’t be as frustrated.
It never worked before and I doubt it will not work this time. But heck, I am going to try it anyway!
Minecraft
I don’t have much to say about it that I didn’t say in my last post about this game.
This is another one I intend to revisit this month, even if it is just to finish building all the stuff I had planned. Then I can finally move on to the magic mods!
Hitman 2
My intention with Hitman 2 was to focus on the story mission and keep progressing forward, instead of just re-playing the same map to complete all the challenges. I got mixed results with that.
Soon as I booted the game I went to where I need to go next, Whittleton Creek. But this map turned out to be so fun that I decided to complete juuust a few challenges. Next thing I knew I went back to Santa Fortuna and completed almost all challenges there. Then I went to Hawke’s Bay completed everything there except for the challenges that involved difficulty levels.
After that I finally moved on to the next story location, the Isle of Sgàil. Still got a couple story missions before the story can progress but that will be my goal for the next time I boot the game. Now if I can only resist the temptation of trying to complete all those challenges…
Fate Grand Order
January in Fate Grand Order began with the re-run of the Records of the Enma-Tei’s Prosperity event. Due to how the event is structured I almost made a mistake at the beginning which wouldn’t let me get all the points for the final reward at the last day.
Once I realized my mistake it took quite a bit of grind for a few days but I managed to get things back in order. Granted, I could have ignored it since I already did the event last year but then I would miss on QP and there is no such thing as too much QP!
After that it was the Amazones.com ~CEO Crisis 2022~ event. I liked how the story in this event poked fun at the insanity of corporate culture. Yet Servantverse Penthesilea still ended up doing (mostly) the right thing due to her work ethics and warrior beliefs.
Another thing I liked about it is that it is one of those events that after a fight a servant would be fatigued, becoming unavailable for a few hours. This forced me to experiment with servants that I would not play with and found some interesting surprises. Granted, I already forgot all of it because I have terrible memory but it was fun anyway! XD
COGEN: Sword of Rewind (Demo)
Because of the Just One Percent Project (go read it, it is an interesting project!) there was some discussion in Discord where people were suggesting indie games for others to play. One of the games suggested was COGEN: Sword of Rewind.
Since it gave me some Megaman vibes (a franchise I love) and it had a demo I decided to give it a try.
The main gimmick, and what makes it stand out from similar games, is that you can rewind up to 3 seconds. If you die the game already starts the rewind process for you. The catch is that there is a sort of energy bar on the top left that gets drained as you rewind. If that bar is empty when you die then you need to restart from the latest save point.
The energy bar does recharge over time so you don’t need to hoard it to “rewind only at the right time!”.
It is also a mechanic that is used at certain parts of the level, like making a platform appear for a few seconds that you have to jump over to get to the other side.
Maybe even other uses of the rewind mechanic too at some other point in the game. But that is pure speculation on my part.
Unfortunately I didn’t get too far into the first level of the game as I found it too hard for me. Despite that I don’t think it is a bad game and highly encourage anyone to give the demo a try if the game sounds interesting to you.