Hi everyone, and welcome back to My Week Unwrapped, where I discuss all the games I’ve been playing over the last seven days. If you pay attention to my YouTube or Twitter accounts, you may have noticed that I spent a lot of time playing Genshin Impact. The latest update that added the area named Inazuma is so massive that I was playing for about five hours each day. That didn’t leave a whole lot of time for other games, so this roundup will be a bit on the short side. I am running out of new content in Genshin, though, so things should go back to normal pretty soon. Anyway, let’s get on with the show!

Night Book

I’m a big fan of full motion video (FMV games) like Her Story and Contradiction, and Wales Interactive is one of the main publishers these days that consistently releases new FMV games, including on mobile. Their latest is Night Book, a short interactive horror movie that takes place entirely on a computer monitor. You don’t actually interact with the computer itself. Instead, you watch as an interpreter navigates her own PC, including the video calls she interprets and the surveillance footage around her home, especially her father’s room. As with similar games, you’re mainly watching the action until the game gives you a choice of two options that will change the outcome of the story. It’s a short game, clocking in at a little under an hour. But there are fifteen possible endings to find, so it seems you’re meant to play it more than once. I haven’t yet, but since I got a bad ending, I’m planning to give it another go. I enjoyed it for what it was, but there were a lot of unanswered questions. So I’m hoping more might be revealed on subsequent playthroughs. The game is free to try with an IAP to unlock the rest of the game, so I recommend at least playing through the demo to see how you like it. I also have gameplay videos below for my full first playthrough.

Tiger Trio’s Tasty Travels

Tiger Trio’s Tasty Travels is an adorable puzzler from Oink Games in which you play as three tiger siblings who run a sushi truck. The goal in each level is to get the correct order to each customer. One sibling can move sushi from one conveyor belt to another. The other two siblings can either add or subtract a piece of sushi. As you progress more animals and mechanics are added. I’ve only played through the first two chapters so far, but I’m impressed. Each level also has a minimum number of moves in which you can solve it and if you do it in that number you get a star. It hasn’t been too challenging yet, but I can see the difficulty ramping up. I’m looking forward to playing more over the next week and will add any new videos to my walkthrough.

NieR Re[in]carnation

I mostly try to avoid free-to-play service games, with Genshin Impact being the main exception. Still, I’d heard good things about the NieR series and I liked the look of NieR Re[in]carnation, even if I was wary of its monetization. As it turns out, I never even made it to a point where money would matter. I barely even made it through the tutorial. I found it boring, confusing, and just not the least bit fun. From the first couple of minutes I was already baffled by the protagonist’s ridiculous run, with her arms flailing at her sides. I also have no idea why she’s wearing a leash and why her guide is a Pac-Man ghost named Mama. Or why Mama has tentacle arms. The battles are mostly auto-attack, while you tap the skill buttons once they’re charged. You can also move around a little but I found it nearly impossible to dodge attacks because I’d always hit an invisible wall. The enemies are also bland, mostly black blobs. And the stories, which are the main content, nearly put me into a coma. I have zero interest in returning to this game, but if you want to try it for your self, by all means do so.

I AM 414C

I covered I AM 414C the last two weeks, both times being turned off by the tedious way in which you decode binary into numbers. The idea is to reveal all the letters on the keyboard of a broken robot. The game got another update this week that streamlined the tools included to decode the binary. It’s far easier now, as it includes a slider instead of just plus and minus buttons. I actually made some good progress with the game, though I had to guess some of the numbers because I didn’t understand how to use the symbols in the equations. I think they might be for programming, and I’m not sure how players are expected to know it. Still, I was happy to continue and guess because I was actually having a conversation with the robot. He wanted me to help him remember. So I gave him the command LOAD (MEMORY) — and the game wiped my progress. I really don’t understand why that command would reset the game, but I’m not really interested in starting over a third time. There’s still an interesting game here, but it should not be so easy to wipe your progress. You can see the game in action in my video below.

Genshin Impact

As I said, I’ve been spending a lot of time with Genshin Impact since the latest update. I’ve cleared most of the big story and world quests available in Inazuma and even managed to get lucky and pull the banner character, Ayaka. I’m having a lot of fun with her and she’s not even fully built yet. Overall, this has been a really enjoyable area to explore. I ran into some gamebreaking bugs, but thankfully they’ve been fixed since and I was able to continue. It’s really insane how much content MiHoYo packed into this area. But I’m finally getting to the point where I think I’ll play more like one hour per day instead of five. Anyway, if you haven’t tried Genshin Impact yet, now is a really good time to start. It is still a gacha game, but there’s so much you can enjoy without ever considering spending money. I still wish it was a premium game, but I can’t deny that it raises the bar for free-to-play games. That’s why I’ve stuck with it this long and can see myself playing for the foreseeable future.

Circulous

It’s been a while since any of us have heard anything about Chain Reaction Games’ Circulous, but today the next content update was announced. The full Act 2 will be releasing very soon and I got access to it early so I could show off some of the puzzles. I’m really impressed with it so far, even if there is a weird bug that caused my game to crash at the end of my video. Again, if you haven’t played the game yet, I highly recommend it. The developer has been following through with his promise for regular content updates, as this is the second one already. The game has really come a long way and I can’t wait to see where it goes. If you’re not afraid of spoilers, check out my short video below of the start of Act 2.

And that’s everything I’ve been up to this week! I also fell down the rabbit hole that is the Manifest TV series. It’s very watchable and I’ve basically been binging it between games. But it also makes me so angry at times because of huge inconsistencies. Still, I’ll stick with it for now and see if it holds my attention to the end. Anyway, let me know in the comments section which games you’re enjoying and I’ll see you back here next week with more of My Week Unwrapped!