Game EXP: Supid Cars (OQ2)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Stupid Cars through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.] 

Stupid Cars
Release Date: January 9, 2025
Systems: Meta Quest, Windows, Nintendo Switch
Publisher: Gimbal Studio
Developer: Gimbal Studio
Time Spent: 1 Hour 17 Minutes

It's probably my fault for not looking too closely at Stupid Cars before I established in my brain what I thought the game was going to be.  Even after watching the trailer, what I was expecting it to be, a VR puzzle game that would be filled with individual puzzles kind of like the board game Rush Hour but played in real-time instead of turns.  Even the trailer almost feels like it leaves a lot to interpretation, not even once focusing on the fact that there is a score counter at the top of the screen.

Stupid Cars is instead closer to what is presented on the surface in the trailer.  A large arcade cabinet with cars and motorcycles zipping by that you're able to manually speed up and slow down, and for each vehicle that safely makes it through to the other side, you get one point.  The highest score. . . is the highest.  There is an online leaderboard but I never felt compelled to attempt to even get close to any of the listed highest scores.  The score is also there as a way of keeping the next level locked, so you have to earn at least 50 points to continue on to the next stage.  There are some modifiers to the score, such as random gold cars that are worth two points, and an unlockable mechanic that speeds up the cars and doubles your score while it's turned on; you're able to toggle the Turbo Mode on and off.  You're also allotted a continue if any of the cars crash to carry over your score when you start the same stage again, although it seems that the rate of the cars driving out is the same as when the car crashed, but the board starts out clear.

Let's go through each level because as you're probably aware, I have some thoughts.

Level 1: Classic

You know, just your basic poorly planned out intersection immediately after a series of eight tunnels.  I don't know why it didn't stick out to me at first, but the cars are driving on the left side of the road, but that obviously didn't bother me as it wasn't something I noticed until level 3.  The tutorial itself is pretty rudimentary and I still found it a little misleading.  I thought that along with being able to speed up the cars, that you could also slow them down beyond their initial starting speed, so three speeds altogether.  I think that's what I was trying to do at 1:40, was to slow the Jeep down, not drive it right into the convertible.  That's also why I was looking down at the control panel, convinced that I missed something about the controls and looking for where the "slow down" button was, not just the "speed up" button.

"Classic" was the only stage I actually felt moderately compelled to get a higher score beyond 50, which is why I played for an additional seven minutes.  It was fun, but at that point, still only about 12 minutes, I decided that with no additional gameplay elements in this mode, I was going to stop.

Level 2: Bus Rush

Yeah, I went into this stage a bit cocky.  Getting 92 points in the previous level and feeling like I had a decent grasp of the mechanics along with fewer intersecting roads felt like this was going to be a proverbial cakewalk, but this one really put me in my place (or did it?).  Not even a minute into the Bus Rush I was barely able to score 8 points, distracted by the bus and where the various roads were intersecting, and seeing two gold-two-point cars got me excited.

The buses ended up being harder to predict how they would affect the rest of the traffic, despite the in-game warning that a bus was coming.  I just found it hard to factor in their length and speed with the rest of the cars on the road, which is kind of the whole point of the game.  But even after the second attempt where I got 43 points, I still felt like I had a decent grasp on the mechanics.  I think the difficulty I faced with this level cemented my desire to not try and go for not a leaderboard high score, but a personal best high score, higher than the 50 required to unlock the next level.

Level 3: Bike Blitz

If I had thought that Bus Rush was hard, I had no idea what was in store for me with Bike Blitz.  This was also, surprisingly enough, the level where I realized that the vehicles driving on the left side of the road, as opposed to the right side like here in the United States, was throwing off my perspective and previous knowledge of traffic circles.  The other complication here was keeping track of the motorcycles/mopeds once they entered the traffic circle because once you get two or more bikes in there at the same time, it's all a manner of remembering when each vehicle entered and where they're going to exit.

I do love how around 19:00 I just gave up a kind of meddling just to see how many points I could score without touching any of the bikes.  Like, maybe that was the trick to this level, was to just let the bikes to their thing and you could get to 50 points.  But, as evidenced by the video, leaving the bikes alone will net you zero points on average.  And it's not like I could feel myself getting any better at this, like it all just felt like luck.  Which is probably why at 21 minutes in, my high score was still only 39.  And then on the next run, I managed to score 39 on my first try, briefly thinking that I would turn Turbo Mode on and off anytime a gold car was about to finish, but I found that tactic to be too risky.  That excitement you see in my magnificent attempt at a laser light show at 22:57 is 100% real.  I wasn't doing that for the camera.

Level 4: Train Wreck

After the chaosness that was Bus Rush and what felt like an exponentially increasing difficulty curve in the game, I was so thankful that this level was easier and thereby, actually felt fun again.  The train moved faster than I thought it would and was on its own dedicated track (as opposed to the bus also using the road) and came at a regular 15 seconds.  I mean, I got 49 points on my second attempt.  Then after only about three minutes, I got 50 points.  I briefly thought about quitting, but because I was feeling more joy than I'd felt since the first level, I decided to continue and just see how high I could get my score; it was 90.

So while it took some getting used to keeping my eye on the track and the rest of the cars on the road, overall, I really enjoyed this level.

Level 5: Loopy Lanes

Like Train Wreck before, Loopy Lanes was more fun than I expected with the return of traffic circles (traffic quarters?).  This level actually feels like it should have come before Bike Blitz as it felt easier despite there being two traffic circles instead of one.  That being said, this level was still pretty challenging having to time the delayed turn of the traffic circle in cars making an elongated right-hand turn; like I'm genuinely curious what the road sign prior to entering that intersection would look like.

Level 6: Chaos

You know, for a level titled "Chaos," I expected the culmination of all of the elements from each previous level to actually feel more chaotic.  I don't mean having cars and bikes and trains and buses all in the same level, and while that would have been entertainingly chaotic, this didn't feel chaotic.  Just busy.  Instead, we have 20 straight lanes of traffic and four intersections with only cars to deal with.  I would have at least expected there to be both cars and bikes or maybe a turn or two.  Maybe an overpass or something.  But sadly no.  Apart from there just potentially being more cars on the roads, the actual playing area was pretty disappointing.

Now, that doesn't mean that this level was easy because dealing with 10+ cars on the screen at the same time is mentally taxing and hard to keep track of.  I probably could have tried additional plays after getting to 69 on my go (at 5:14), but with how uninspired Chaos felt, I didn't really feel like trying to get a higher score than 70.

So that's Stupid Cars, or at least most of it.  I only unlocked two medals which can give you bonus points, which is probably how people get 350+ points on Classic, although I never looked into how to unlock all of the medals or how to actively try and score bonus points based on the medals I did have.  I'm not a big multiplayer person, but something about this game feels like it could somehow benefit from multiple players, although not even the Nintendo Switch version is multiplayer, so it's not just an issue to get it to work in VR.  I don't really know how much this game benefits from being a VR title as the controllers basically felt like mouse pointers and even though I was equipped with two of them, I never felt coordinated enough to use both at the same time; plus I felt that one was more than enough in most situations.  The environment was neat, but it was always the same skybox and ther was no change in the decore as you progressed through the game.  I guess I just feel like even without trying to unlock all of the medals, there didn't feel like there was a whole lot of game here.  Six levels that are already in endless mode so there really isn't anywhere to go unless you're trying for the leaderboard.

So yeah, I did have fun 60% of the time, with two of the middle levels causing me all manners of grief.  But if high-score hunting is your thing, then a VR game for less than $6.00 might just be your thing.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faeplantman/Jaconian
Pacing Deserted Roads

Game EXP: Benign Land (VSD)

 [Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Benign Land through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.] 

Benign Land
Systems: Windows, Linux
Release Date: January 24, 2025
Publisher: Afternature Productions
Developer: Leandros Ntolas
Time Spent: 93 Minutes

I am, admittedly, woefully ignorant about the Troubles, the time predominantly in Ireland between 1969 and 1998 when Irish republicans fought for Irish unification and separation from the United Kingdom, while Ulster loyalists along with the United Kingdom fought to keep Northern Ireland part of the UK.  There is a whole lot more to it than that inadequate sentence, but that's the best I can do right now without just copying verbatim the entire Wikipedia article.  So I knew that going into Benign Lands, a video game adaptation of an immersive visual arts experience about Ireland's history with the latter half focusing on the Troubles, what I was getting myself into, but only just and again, admittedly most of the imagery went over my head.

Beforehand, I knew the generalities of the conflict.  I knew about Bloody Sunday, but couldn't give you an exact date, and to be honest, I'm not great with remembering specific dates of historical importance.  I knew about the Good Friday Agreement, but again, I couldn't give you any kind of specifics.  I knew that there were bombings carried out by the IRA, but I couldn't give you locations.  I'm sure that it was covered to a certain extent in any of my World History courses from Jr. High through High School, but only that the conflict was still ongoing because I graduated High School in 1998 and I couldn't tell you when our textbooks had last been updated.  I knew that certain neighborhoods in Belfast were separated between Catholics and Protestants, but I didn't know that they were called "Peace Walls."  I also knew nothing about the Prison Maze, the multiple hunger strikes, or any other dozens of things that were not deemed important to go over in the flurry of information during history classes.

So this is where I was going into Benign Land, pretty bad I admit.  I was hopeful though because the game says that the original experience was created from an outsider's perspective, which I misinterpreted as meaning that the player didn't have to know anything about the Troubles in order to get the message of the game.  What I didn't know was that the outsider was actually the developer, Leandros Ntolas.  Again, that was on me for not being better prepared before starting.

Now, before we get to the actual gameplay, there needs to be some hardware context.  I played on the Steam Deck because I knew that my laptop would not be able to handle anything that uses photorealism as its basis.  I first started the game on Wednesday night and immediately knew that I was going to have to make some graphical adjustments because just in the menus, the game was maxing out at 12 fps.  I also noticed that the GPU was running at 99% while the CPU was hovering around 45%.  Not a great sign.  So I lowered the graphics down to Low and was able to get a max fps of 24, but even that felt exceedingly sluggish as you'll be able to tell down below in the playthrough video.

First, I couldn't tell what was going on when I tried to invert the Y-axis for the right joystick.  I could hear and see the click, but the box itself never changed so I had to go into the controller configuration in the Steam settings to make the necessary changes.  I can't always tell from the other playthrough videos I watched, but the way the game felt to me was that I was swimming through thick viscous water, that the controls were sluggish and response-delayed.  The first time I played (and the video I recorded) there were countless times I found myself looking up at the ceiling or down at the ground as I found that I was often overcompensating with the right joystick.  There also seemed to be a baked-in mechanic that slowed you down if you were going in the wrong direction of where the portal to the next scene was, coupled with invisible walls hampered my desire to explore.  There were also two instances above where the portal didn't seem to initially take and made me think that there was something else I needed to do.

Sadly a lot of that last paragraph made it hard for me to either enjoy and/or understand everything to do with the visuals.  True that I didn't catch most of the visual references, but I can only blame myself for that.  The rest of the blame lies with the Steam Deck and that this game, even on low settings was too much for the system to play smoothly and in a way that felt enjoyable.  While a lot of the visuals were impressive and beautiful to be in the presence of while I walked/floated through each environment, I was saddened that I felt more frustrated than anything with how the game played than anything else.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

On Our Fellow Men We Prey

Demo Time: Fourth Time Around (PC)

 [Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Fourth Time Around through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.] 

Fourth Time Around Demo
Systems: Windows, macOS
Release Date: March, 2025
Publisher: Pennywhistle Studios
Developer: Pennywhistle Studios
Time Spent: 28 Minutes 27 Seconds

I have to keep reminding myself that the Fourth Time Around Demo is only a demo because, holy hell, it was effective.  The disclaimer is upfront that a fair amount of the demo is not going to make sense or tell a cohesive story that the player will be able to follow or fully make sense of, but that really played to the strengths of establishing an uncomfortable and tense feeling throughout the whole 28 minutes.  So rather than try and parse what I played, I'm just going to embed it right here.

Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there.  Kind of?  My biggest hangup, and what hampered my otherwise perfect cinematography, was that there was no option to invert the Y-axis on the camera, but since the game is more of a walking sim and less of a first-person shooter, I found I was able to adapt somewhat well.

The Itch.io and Steam descriptions tout that this is a game without jump scares, which I think is true for the most part, but there were several sudden moments that creeped me out.  When I first gained control of the camera on the train and saw the woman's face scribbled out, it gave me a bit of a start.  The frequent camera glitches seemed to always put me on edge.  Then the green cabin scene when you click to "Leave" and when you turn there's a field full of the same woman in all of the poses you previously saw her in earlier in the stage gave me literal shivers down my shoulders and back.  And once you get the gun both times made me woefully uncomfortable both in the game and its implications on the story.  I also loved the moment at 12:27 when the kitchen started filling with white noise that became the phone ringing as I found it played on my anxiety about talking on the phone.

I don't really know how else to talk about this demo any more than this, which I recognize is fairly paltry.  It really felt like the whole of the demo was informing players on how they're going to feel when the full game is released and even if only half of the game makes me feel as unsettled and tense as these 28 minutes, then I'm all in.

And if you want select moments from this playthrough, I made a couple of trailers, I guess you'd call them because just like Liminal Dimension, Fourth Time Around lends itself very well to creating unsettling snippits.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

Game EXP: Baby Blues Nightmares - Toddler Horror Game (VSD)

 [Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Baby Blues Nightmares - Toddler Horror Game through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.] 

Baby Blues Nightmares - Toddler Horror Game

Systems: Windows, Linux

Release Date: September 16, 20204

Publisher: Steelkrill Studio

Developer: Steelkrill Studio

Time Spent: 3 Hours 48 Minutes

I had moderately high hopes for Baby Blues Nightmares - Toddler Horror Game even though the first-person toddler perspective survival-horror genre only has a few games to this niche sub-genre, one of which I first played in Among the Sleep after it was released following its successful Kickstarter back in 2014.  In "Among the Sleep," you play as a toddler in onesie pajamas as they navigate a somewhat disturbing fantastic setting of real-world locations melded with fantastic story-book-like settings, all the while avoiding gigantic horrors that turn out to be an alcoholic parent.  You also have a smarmy-cabby-like-talking teddy bear as a companion.  In Baby Blues Nightmares, while you are another onesie-clad toddler, you now find yourself in the real-world location of your house and Red Belly's Funhouse & Childcare facility where you're tasked with locating your dolls to help you fight off and defend yourself from the titular character of Red Belly.

Since I played on the Steam Deck, I didn't have to do much to get the game to play the way I wanted it to.  I didn't need to use any compatibility settings and the game ran at a consistent 30 fps with a combination of Ultra/High/Medium graphical settings.  I did have to map a few keyboard buttons to the L4 and R4 back buttons like Left-Ctrl to crouch and Q to pick up and interact with certain items in the game.  In Chapter 3 after acquiring the map and tinkering with the not-always-intuitive control UI, I tried creating a shortcut for the map to the 1 key (the game lets you create shortcuts for up to four items using the 1,2,3,4 key), but I couldn't get the game to pull up the map for me when I pressed the button on the Steam Deck. By default, the 1 key is mapped to the Up button on the left touchpad, but since that didn't seem to work, I created another mapping for the Up on the directional pad, but that didn't work either.  Another gripe I had to deal with was opening drawers to use as steps to get on top of dressers and the like.  Like a good Amnesia game, you had to click and hold on the drawer then manually slide the drawer out.  The way that the controls on the Steam Deck were set up, was that I to either use the Claw Grip to press the B button with my index finger and swipe the right touchpad (or the right joystick, but I never did this), or use my right thumb on the B button and swipe with my left hand.  Very inconvenient all around, but thankfully I was never forced into this kind of maneuver while being chased.

Another complaint rests with the saving mechanic and its implementation.  In the opening stage, from what I could tell, there were no save spots and I didn't notice any autosaving happening.  Only after reaching Chapter 2 are save spots introduced, which feels rather late considering the first chapter really felt like an otherwise well-constructed tutorial chapter.  Don't get me wrong though, I love that a separate nap room is a brilliant use the environment and maintaining a sense of continuity for the player playing as a onesie-clad toddler.  However, later in Chapter 3, I discovered, I think, that you're able to save only once per room, with no indication from the game that this is a mechanic.  In my Chapter 3 Part 2 video, at about 24:30, I figured I would unload the items I had collected and then save and quit, but I couldn't without the game telling me why, which is why I assume save/nap rooms are like one-time-only consumables.  I might've chalked it up to a glitch, but it happened again in my Chapter 3 Part 2 video (x:xx.xx).  I'm not against a survival horror game having limited saves (a la the original Resident Evil), but that information needs to be relayed to the player.

There were several other mechanics that I ended up either not using, or didn't see the point of, mainly the tricycle.  In Chapters 1 and 3, a tricycle with a trailer to load with items is available.  In Chapter 1, you only ride the tricycle out of the garage and around a corner before you either stop at the sight of your mom being creepy, or you just continue another couple of yards before that goopy mass bursts through the hedges and ends your ride.  I never felt that this was enough of a tutorial or plants the incentive with the player that the tricycle was an integral part of the game to warrant locating it in Chapter 3 as a necessary survival mechanic, especially since you had to locate the spare wheel first.  For me, by the time I really understood the map and where I was in it at most times, I felt confident in being able to navigate around the facility while being able to avoid Red Belly.  I also felt that I had better mobility on foot if I needed to make a quick turn, or if I needed to crawl into a duct or a locker to avoid Red Belly, assuming that the time required to dismount from the tricycle or even make an about-face would hamper me from being able to make a faster escape.  So even though I found the spare wheel, spray paint, bike bell, and teddy bear, I felt no need to actually find the tricycle.  And relating to running away from Red Belly, I felt that the rate that your stamina replenished outweighed the amount of time it would take to open up the menu to drink a bottle of milk in time to continue running away, so I never ended up using milk to replenish my stamina; unless I completely misunderstood what Fresh Milk was supposed to do.

I have mixed feelings about the in-game map that you find, since it's not readily provided and easily accessible.  when I first came upon the map, I nearly missed it because it was darkened by the blood/goop on the ground and I only saw it because of the white hand that appeared over it.  Upon seeing the size of the facility, I was pretty overwhelmed especially this is a map in a video game operating in a very non-video game manner.  There is no compass, there is no "you are here" on the map, and a lot of what is depicted on the map could be categorized as subjective to what is actually in the room.  But that does make a certain kind of sense.  The map is hand drawn, presumably by Aiden or someone a little older, so it's not going to be as accurate and as easy to follow as something you might find in "The Elder Scrolls Online" or "Assassin's Creed: Origins."  By the end of the game, I was finding that I wasn't looking at the map as long to figure out where I was, but to figure out how to get to where I wanted to go as I already knew my location, but while I felt more comfortable navigating this massive space, I still wasn't overly thrilled with the color scheme of the X's denoting the dolls, or something important, or a point of interest as under certain lights, they all kind of looked the same.

Let's briefly review the game's ending, as there is some potentially heavy and triggering material here.

After collecting all five of Aiden's lost dolls, he is all of a sudden on a narrow path leading up towards the unknown, flanked by scenes from his recent memory.  Most of these scenes could be considered memories, except that there are a few that are before Aiden's birth, but I understand the desire and need for an exposition dump here at the end of the game.  You pass scenes of spousal abuse that were pretty difficult to hear since the scenes looked more like animatronic displays with simple movements.  But still hearing the repeated slaps/punches was difficult to listen to.  It is then revealed that Aiden's father murdered his mother, likely at the beginning of the game during Chapter 1.  I'm not quite sure how to feel about the semi-rosy ending about Aiden ending up in foster care while having experienced all of this trauma, before, during, and after the actual gameplay.  Was then Aiden's running around Red Belly's Funhouse & Child Care facility supposed to have only occurred in his mind, or did Aiden's father take him there and then somehow lose track of him?  I assume that's who Red Belly was in the game, a visage that Aiden placed over his Dad when he was in a violent and abusive rage.  And then the stinger at the end of the game actually made me really sad, seeing Red Belly's hand rise up from the base of the crib while knowing that this is likely a figment of Aiden's imagination, but that he is currently and will likely relive this trauma while in the foster care system for years and likely decades to come.  I don't know if I can or want to further analyze Aiden's living situation and past/present trauma because I'm not set up for that kind of analysis; also reading a book where physical child abuse happened against a child by a once-loving parent coupled with this game is hitting particularly hard right now.  

It's a difficult topic. While I don't mind using video games as an avenue to talk about and discuss trauma, I don't know if "Baby Blues Nightmares" is the best game to be that vanguard. But honestly, who am I to tell someone that what doesn't sit well with me is the wrong approach, especially if the game was created as a coping mechanism? But that's just how I feel.

Despite all of that, there was quite a bit that I actually enjoyed. I still think that having a survival horror game from a child's perspective is still novel when handled well.  Having to think about how you're going to unlock and open a door when you can't even reach the door knob is a neat idea. I didn't mind the immersion-breaking mechanic of a toddler throwing a wooden truck hard enough to break a sheet of glass and then crawling up and over the shards of glass without taking any damage, that just would've been annoying despite it only happening a handful of times.  There were a handful of well-placed jump scares that weren't dependent on the player being a child that I found genuinely frightening.  Moments that involved stationary dolls like clowns in Chapter 1 and the wooden puppet in Chapter 2 I thought were well executed.  Each jump scare involving Red Belly I thought was well timed and helped to maintain the physical weight and terror of this creature as he/it never felt that it was some flitty entity moving about the facility.  There were a couple jump scares related to finding Aiden's coveted dolls but they didn't always happen after acquiring each doll, which made the actual scare that much more impactful.  I also liked the auto-blinking mechanic as it kept me on edge, not knowing if something was going to appear between blinks.

You know, despite there being significantly more criticism that I had to say about Baby Blues Nightmares - Toddler Horror Game, I did enjoy it for the most part, and despite all of the negative things I had to say about it.  While there were some mechanics that I enjoyed, others didn't feel well implemented or even necessary, but that didn't take away from the moments I was enjoying the game itself.  I never felt that the game was cheap in its jump scares, and being able to hide from Red Belly successfully without getting caught was always satisfying; in that the two times I was caught felt fair, that I had messed up and not that the game broke its own rules.  Oddly enough, being lost with the map was probably the lowest point in the game for me, but at the same time, figuring out the map and getting to where I needed to go was the high point.

If you'd like to watch one or all of my playthrough videos, they're up on YouTube here; although I do apologize for the videos being darker than they were on the Steam Deck, I'm still working on that.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
The Shadows Come to Dance, My Lord

Game EXP: Minestrone (VSD)

 [Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Minestrone through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.] 

Minestrone
Systems: Windows
Release Date: December 3, 2024
Publisher: Archor Games
Developer: Archor Wright
Time Spent: 28 Minutes

I'm not really sure what to make of Minestrone.  Is it an experimental walking-sim?  Is it a tech demo?  Is it a resume builder?  I wouldn't expect the game to be immediately Steam Deck compatible and even after trying more than five different compatibility options, starting with Proton Experimental and working my way down the list, I eventually settled on Proton [x] because I wasn't experiencing any difference.  The biggest problems I experienced during the game were that there was significant audio clipping and that the game maxed out at 16 frames per second.  Because this is a walking-sim, 16 fps is still playable.

The purpose of the game is to follow a trail of what I assume to be tomatoes through an Italian city and collect ingredients from people who have a green "Talk to me" text floating above them until you have collected everything.  Your tomato collection meter counts up from one to 99 and none of the tomatoes were hidden in a way that became frustrating or difficult to find.  One thing that remains unclear to me is what the actual goal is, to collect 99 tomatoes, or to talk to everyone to collect the specific ingredients like garlic, thyme, and olive oil?  In the game, when I collected the last tomato before I talked to the last person, the game said that I had found the final ingredient, "Good work! Your recipe is complete."  And then immediately after I talked to my final NPC and the game continued until I manually quit.

The only other thing of note in the game is the NPC animations, which while incredibly blurry were very fluid and felt more lifelike than many NPCs in other modern games I've played in recent years. The NPCs didn't necessarily look like they were part of the environment in that they existed within the environment but were not active with elements such as buildings, tables, or chairs.  Their animations would also loop after several seconds, but since there was only one line of dialogue per NPC, there was never a reason to stand around and watch the animations loop.

That's really all that there is to Minestrone.  I completed the game in just under 16 minutes and then walked around for nearly another five minutes to see if I had missed anything.  The description on Steam suggests that there are hidden easter eggs, although apart from one closed storefront with Archor Games, and an in-world advertisement telling me to check out Archor Games on Steam, I don't know what else there was so it's likely that I missed something deeper, or just another another ad.

And really, maybe that's all that Minestrone is.  Just another ad for Archor Games to be like, "Hey, we can make a walking-sim in Unreal Engine 5.5."

And to watch all 20 minutes of my playthrough, I've included it below:

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

Year In Review: 2024

Nothing says a "Year in Review" like lists so let's stick with a good thing and make a tradition out of it!

We're going to start off with games and demos released in 2024 that I played, followed by games that I bought in 2024, followed by games released in 2024 that interested me that I neither played nor bought.  And then we'll close everything up with both the Nintendo and Steam's lookback at 2024; with a heavy caveat that The Squire has heavily influenced both of my lists.

Games & Demos Released in 2024 that I played:

• Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown Demo (January 18)
• Pacific Drive Demo (February 5)
• Skelethrone: The Prey (March 14)
• Botany Manor Demo (April 9)
• POOLS Demo (April 26)
• INDIKA & INDIKA Demo (May 2)
• Classic Marathon (May 10)
• BAISU (May 30)
• Seed of Life (May 30)
• Whispering Lane (June 18)
• She Could Fly: Documentary Escape Game (July 11)
• Abathor Demo (July 25)
• Light - Die to Survive (July 30)
• Candlelight Lament Demo (August 5)
• Umbral (August 7)
• DATE A LIVE: Ren Dystopia (September 5)
• Ale & Tale Tavern (September 5)
• Judero Demo (September 16)
• Enotria: The Last Song Demo (September 19)
• Miss Rosen's Wowtastic! Marching Band (October 10)
• Hatch Tales: A Heroic Hookshot Adventure (October 22)
• While We Wait Here Demo (October 23)
• Portrait of a Torn Demo (October 24)
• Innsmouth 22 (October 25)
• Miniatures Demo (November 14)
• The Liminal Dimension (November 27)
• Minestrone (December 3)

Games I Purchased in 2024 that I Haven't Played Yet

• Meifumado (July 18)
• Chrono Sword (December 6)

I believe that these two games were the only games released in 2024 that I purchased but have yet to play. Although because these were games "funded" through Kickstarter, I didn't actually pay for them in 2024, I'm still allowing them here because they were released this year. Pendant semantics, I guess.

Games Released in 2024 that I Have Not Yet Bought or Played

• Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (January 18)
• Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth (January 25)
• Balatro (February 20)
• Pentiment (February 22)
• Alone in the Dark (March 20)
• Dragons Dogma 2 (March 22)
• Botany Manor (April 9)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade: Wrath of the Mutants (April 23)
• Another Crab's Treasure (April 25)
• POOLS (April 26)
• Stellar Blade (April 26)
• Animal Well (May 9)
• Senua's Saga: Hellblade II (May 21)
• Duck Detective: The Secret Salami (May 23)
• Still Wakes the Deep (June 18)
• Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition (July 18)
• SteamWorld Heist II (August 8)
• Black Myth: Wukong (August 20)
• Tactical Breach Wizards (August 22)
• Emio - The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club (August 29)
• Squirrel with a Gun (August 29)
• Star Wars Outlaws (August 30)
• Edge of Sanity (September13)
• The Plucky Squire (September 17)
• UFO 50 (September 18)
• Enotria: The Last Song (September 19)
• Home Safety Online (September 20)
• The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (September 26)
• Mouthwashing (September 26)
• Zoochosis (September 30)
• Silent Hill 2 (October 8)
• Neva (October 15)
• Clock Tower Rewind (October 29)
• Dragon Age: The Veilguard (October 31)
• Slitterhead (November 8)
• Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake (November 14)
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl (November 20)
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (December 9)
• MiSide (December 11)

So as you can tell from this last section, I haven't played nearly enough games released in 2024 to have any kind of informed say as to what "The Best Game of 2024" should be.  Of all of the games that I played that were released in 2024, the only one I paid for was Hatch Tales which was from a 2018 Kickstarter, while all of the rest were either free-to-play, demos, or I received through Keymailer.  I'm actually planning on an article after the first of the year going into several of the games that I've helped fund through various online fundraising platforms and for one reason or another, have not played (yet).

So let's briefly take a look at my Nintendo 2024 Year in Review and Steam 2024 Replay.

On the Nintendo Switch, I think the funniest thing is how much The Squire played New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe using my account, so therefore, I ended up clocking upwards of 45 hours in that game.  Or did I?  

I would say that "I think" that this chart feels accurate, except that since this is how Nintendo categorizes games, I guess it is accurate.  All of the top three games have action elements as well as Role playing and adventure, although NSMBUD  is probably considered just straight action since I don't see "Platformer" as a genre.

As for Steam, the genres are a little more varied and less traditional:

I feel like Rhythm is solely from the BIT.TRIP series that The Squire likes to play and have me play, which I'm perfectly fine with; unless he wants me to play as Invisible CommanderVideo, which he does often.  The only game I can think of as Tower Defense is Plants vs. Zombies which I didn't think we played that much, but that's obviously not true.  I'm sure I can track down the Metroidvania games, and I'm positive that the rest of the genres here are from a combination of free games I acquired through Keymailer this year and a bunch of demos that I played too.

The only other metric that surprised me a little was how much I actually played on my laptop, but then I remembered that most of the Steam games I play with The Squire are all played on my laptop and I usually get in an hour or so of gaming on the Steam Deck.  Even though it accounts for 68%, I'm still thankful to the Steam Deck for getting me not only back into my Steam queue, but also making games through other clients accessible since my laptop isn't the powerhouse it never was.

Now, if we were to do the same thing for TV/Streaming shows, movies, and games, we'd probably be here for another couple of minutes, but let's be quick about it.  I read through mostly more Forgotten Realms books ending with Ed Greenwood's Crown of Fire, the second book in the Shandril's Saga trilogy.  I did read Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo and really enjoyed that take on a new fantasy setting that wasn't strictly Western European based.  In TV land, Conklederp and I really enjoyed The Acolyte, the ill-fated Star Wars series, and were both saddened by its cancellation.  We started and are still planning on finishing the second season of The Rings of Power, but finding time to sit down and watch an hour of TV after The Squire goes to bed has been really difficult for the last six months.  This is also why we have yet to start watching Skeleton Crew.  Movie-wise, Conklederp and I did see Longlegs back in August (I think), and then I went out to see Alien: Romulus with Himo.  I think that's it.  I would have wanted to see a couple of other movies, but again, finding an available sitter during a specific weekend is not always the easiest.  And the new Nosferatu was just released, so maybe we'll be able to sneak away for the requisite 3.5 hours to drive, see the movie, grab a post-movie beer, and drive home?  I might also end up seeing the new Superman without Conklederp as I'm not sure if that's her cup of tea.

So yeah, that was 2024.  I don't know if we'll be picking up the Switch 2 if it's announced/released in 2025.  Maybe that could be a Christmas present?  This means any 2025 games will end up being played on the Steam Deck, although there's always the high possibility that there'll still be plenty of indie games released on the Switch as well.  It's also probably getting close to the time to replace my laptop, but before we do that, we'll likely be replacing Conklederp's 2014 (or is it 2012?) MacBook first.  I guess it's just about that time to consult my hastily scotch-taped crystal ball to find out what's in store, assuming that it's not just showing an empty void after the third week of January.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Hide From the Scary Scenes

Game EXP: The Liminal Dimension (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for The Liminal Dimension through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]  

The Liminal Dimension

Systems: Windows, Linux

Release Date: November 27, 2024

Publisher: Airem

Developer: Airem

Time Spent: 43 Minutes

I previously played a game from Airem earlier in the year, Whispering Lane, which was a first-person exploration game with psychological-horror and survival-horror elements that was buggy in a way where you could end up soft-locked, and just too difficult in a way that wasn't fun enough for me to want to finish the game.  In Whispering Lane, you had several environments and locations to explore while collecting items to use in puzzles while fighting off the occasional demonic horror.  While not an entirely flawless execution, Liminal Dimension feels very much like a game developed by Airem (as if I could point them out of a line-up), in that there looks to be a bit more polish here where you explore a single location through a series of loops and visual distortions that amount to a satisfying game.

There was a bit of tinkering I needed to do on the Steam Deck in terms of controller settings, like mapping the Q and Left Control buttons to two of the back buttons, but apart from that, the game ran beautifully.  And while I did notice the hallways tearing a couple of times along the floor and walls, I couldn't be 100% certain that this wasn't intentional, or more likely a result of the game engine handling potentially infinitely repeating hallways.  It was something that I could easily overlook and did.  I will link my unedited playthrough here, and I'll also include the whole video at the end of the article.

But now, on with the rest of the game.  And of course, Spoiler Warnings from here on out.

The premise of Liminal Dimension is that you play the character of Harry who finds himself delirious in a hospital slipping into unconsciousness.  When you "come to," you're in an elevator, supposedly in a hotel, which we only know about because of the pre-level narration telling us this.  This was the second time, this early in the game that I kinda went "Ehhh, do we need that?"; the first was the computer-generated voice reading an epigraph.  This secondary epigraph of sorts I feel is both redundant and not needed.  Before we even start playing, we don't need to know that we're in an elevator as it's something that we'll find out in mere seconds.  If we're waking up in an elevator, then how do we know that this elevator is located in a hotel and not a parking garage or the same hospital that we lost consciousness in?  Then there's the reiterating the phrase from the ???? voice during the opening, that "Exit...It's the key...don't forget...exit."  The only thing I can think of is that maybe during playtesting that that line was glossed over so players were missing this key game mechanic?  Even mentioning that "Harry stared at the buttons on the panel, searching for the number 3" feels like it was inserted into the game because people couldn't find their way out of the elevator?  This is of course just speculation but I don't think that this opening is needed 

Once you leave the elevator, everything seems normal enough. You're in a dark green hallway that turns to the left, leading to a hallway of locked doors that dead ends after a right turn. Once you turn around, things start repeating themselves, and it's your goal to find a way out, however, out of what and out to where is an open-ended question.  As you walk up and down identical and looping liminal hallways, you're supposed to follow the EXIT signs from what I can tell.  Several EXIT signs only have the I halfway lit that I think you're supposed to ignore, but as I was attempting to finish the game and not do a full-on exploration of all of the game's possible mechanics, I would turn around to look for the fully lit EXIT sign.  I am also not sure if interacting with the letters and cards you find scattered about are environmental triggers, but this would definitely seem to be the case since when you pick them up, they otherwise obscure the rest of the screen.  So picking up cards and following the EXIT sign are essentially what you do for the whole game.

Me being me though, there were a few times when I read too far into the "Exit...It's the key" bit.  In one instance, I noticed that the red EXIT was reflected in the glass on a painting on the wall, except that the back of the EXIT sign was facing the painting, so the EXIT should not have been visible in the reflection.  I'm willing to bet that that was just something in the game engine messing up and that it was unintentional, but if it was intentional as a literal red herring, then major kudos to Airem for that, because I really enjoyed that effect both visually and feeling that maybe I was seeing something that I wasn't supposed to see or that Harry's brain was possibly playing tricks on him.

The letters, notes, and pictures are where the rest of the obtuse storytelling comes into play.  When I first started, I had thought that Harry might have been in an event such as a car accident and was experiencing something akin to Limbo while doctors worked to resuscitate him.  However, after reading as many of the notes as I could find I began to wonder if Harry wasn't actually an experiment at exploring a space where people go between life and death.  A plane or existence of repeating environments where otherworldly creatures sometimes lurk.  I thought of it as a mix between the hallway in P.T. and the film Flat Liners, except the organization running Project Lumen felt more well-funded than five medical students.  As the game progressed, it felt more confident that Harry had been purposefully sent to this liminal dimension, although the specific reason I was not able to determine.

Thankfully though, Liminal Dimension does a lot more to mess with the player than I was expecting from a typical game about exploring liminal spaces that throw the occasional beach ball or lawn chair in the middle of your path; albeit those are still spine-tingling moments for me.  Here we have visual effects accompanied by an audible stinger to let the player know that something that just happened was supposed to have happened.  You might find yourself walking, turning the corner of a hallway for the 87th time, but the camera pulls hard to the left but you're still looking straight ahead.  Or were you spun around and now you're looking behind you? Or you're walking down a hallway and suddenly the environment flips so that you're now walking on the ceiling.  One of the more trippy effects was when, and I cannot confirm this until I extract that section from my gameplay video and run it through the Oculus Quest 2, but I think the game briefly projects in stereoscopic vision.  And all of the in-game clocks that I came across displayed real-world time, which I just thought was a really cool touch.

Eventually, the game concludes with Harry finding his way back to the elevator although the omnipresent whispering voice wants Harry to question the validity of his reality.  Is he really going back to the same reality he left?  And will he be the same as when he left?  Despite the hinting at a larger world beyond what we see in the game itself, hinted at in letters and the final scene, I feel like there doesn't need to be a follow-up to Liminal Dimension that explores this space in greater detail, say with a platoon of armed space marines.  Please don't go this route, because as the game stands right now, it was a refreshing take on the exploration of liminal spaces with scripted events that were both entertaining and slightly unnerving.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Scarred and Empty

And now for your viewing pleasure, my playthrough of The Liminal Dimension in eye-watering 1080p.