My Week Unwrapped: January 1, 2018 – INSIDE, The Witness, Subsurface Circular, Vignettes, Cinco Paus, Life is Strange and More!

img_7417

Hi everyone! Happy new year and welcome to the first My Week Unwrapped of 2018! I was busy putting together my Games of the Year list, so I didn’t have time for too many games this week, but I still have a few to discuss. So I’ll just jump right in.

INSIDE

I finished playing Playdead’s INSIDE and wrote my review. It was a wild ride full of nonstop surprises and even when I was frustrated, I was still having too good a time to give up. I highly, highly recommend picking up the fee demo and trying it for yourself. You can also read my review here and see my full play-through here.

The Witness

Even though I haven’t had the time to really play more of The Witness over the last few weeks, I finally got my review written before the end of the year. I put so many hours into the game and I’m still not done. If you’re a puzzle fan and you’re looking for a game that will challenge you but also offer a ton of content, this is the one. You can read my review here and see more gameplay videos here.

Cinco Paus

I enjoyed Michael Brough’s Imbroglio for a while, and Cinco Paus looked kind of similar, so I decided to take a chance on it. But I think I’m just too dumb or lazy to get good at it. It’s a roguelike where you have to get to pick up points in each room and get to the exit to the next room. There are monsters in your way and you can either attack them head on — kind of like in Imbroglio, or use one of your five staves on them. The catch is that until you use the staff, you won’t know what it does. And even after you do, you only know some of its spells. Icons are stored next to it so you remember what each staff can do, but it’s all wiped clean on the next game and you start from scratch. The other catch is that any help you’ll get from the game is in Portuguese, not English. Apparently, you’re supposed to be able to figure everything out from the symbols and not need the descriptions, but it feels like too much work to me to keep track of everything the way it is. I think it’s just not my kind of game, but I’m sure there’s an audience out there for it. You can watch my gameplay video below if you want to see what it’s like.

Subsurface Circular

I had high expectations for Mike Bithell’s Subsurface Circular, as I like short narrative games and the concept sounded interesting to me. You play as a robot detective on an underground train called the Subsurface Circular. You interview passengers and try to solve the mystery of the disappearing Treks, a certain kind of robot. The problem is, the dialogue never truly sucked me in. After my first session with it, I had to keep forcing myself to come back to it just to finish it. I started playing near the end of October and only just finished it yesterday. It took me over two months to play even though it’s only about two hours long. I wish I had found it more compelling. I really wanted to like it. But besides a few chuckles here and there and some snippets of interesting dialogue, I was mostly bored. I was hoping it would all be worth it for the ending, but that was underwhelming, too. It seemed forced and the more I think about it, the less sense it makes to me. Unfortunately, this is not a game I would recommend. But if you want to see what it’s like, you can watch my gameplay video below.

Vignettes

Not much new here. I already played through the new spooky content in Vignettes last week, but now I made a video walkthrough for it, since a few people asked. You can also see my text guide here.

Adventure Escape: Murder Inn

I made a lot more progress with my Adventure Escape: Murder Inn walkthrough. It’s occasionally buggy and illogical, but I do like that they’ve been improving on certain things with each game, like letting you skip puzzles you already solved. It makes it less painful if you quit the game mid-chapter. I don’t have video for this yet but I should soon.

Adventure Escape: Allied Spies

I’ve also made more progress with my Allied Spies walkthrough. It is quite a big game, so please bear with me!

Life is Strange

I spent some more time with Square Enix’s Life is Strange port, but the sound cut out from my video so I’m not uploading it. I’m still struggling with the touchscreen controls, as I tap on a character to interact and instead Max walks off away from them. I’m going to try and mess with the settings to see if I can make them work for me. Right now, they’re taking me out of the moment and my entire focus becomes the controls. I hope I can figure something out because I’ve been wanting this game on my iPad for so long!

Games of the Year List

And last, I wanted to bring your attention to the list of my favorite games of 2017. There’s 45 in total and I think they’re all very worth playing. I’d also love to hear what your favorite games were, so please let me know! Until next time, that’s My Week Unwrapped!

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.