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98: There Were No Ramekins
98: There Were No Ramekins
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Tested On Humans Escape Room (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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I’ve enjoyed this sort of puzzle game in the past, a category I’d include The Witness, The Room, Maquette, Doors – Paradox, and so on in, so when Amazon were giving away a whole set of them, of which Tested On Humans Escape Room was one, I was very pleased. Sadly, it isn’t great.

The issues I had were mainly because the puzzles were either way too obvious or incredibly obscure and illogical. The joy of puzzle games is when they make you feel Very Clever, but TOHES never does that. It also doesn’t help that at least one of the puzzles has two working solutions but only one is accepted.

The Triangle Puzzle, not named in the game but it is, uh, a triangle, is one of these. You’re give a triangle with spaces on each side for coloured balls. Clues elsewhere show that each ball is worth a certain amount, and each side must add up to a certain total. My screenshot is a working solution, but isn’t the correct answer.

There is a plot, in that you’re a sort of prisoner in a medical testing facility, but that never really amounts to anything. You uncover notes about you, and your – presumably dead given all the blood – cellmates but in the end it’s all just a dream? Or isn’t? It’s very unsatisfying.

So, OK for free, but a bit of a disappointment. I might try one of the other games in the series just to see if it’s any better.

Definitely not a copy of Rubik’s Clock at all.

June Update – oh Sony!, you bunch of idiots!

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Play

Prey (PS5) - Completed 

I've mainly been distracted by the World Cup but I did manage to complete Prey, the ending sequence is tense and has you making some big choices. 

 

I still hate Mimics!

Seas of Stars (PS5)

A shame, see bin

Like A Dragon:Pirate Yakuza (PS5)

A full game with nothing but Majima! I've completed chapter one and unlocked the ship, I need to understand the mechanics of sailing around the opening area to develop my skill/experience.

A RGG game is like your favourite blanket

Animal Busters (Android)

Still playing but I'm getting bored of it so will bin it soon.

Rogue Legend (Android)

This is much more enjoyable than Animal Busters & has regular updates with new content.


2026 Gaming Resolutions Update

1. Purchase no more physical games, yes this resolution is even tougher now!

Another good month, nothing purchased.


2. Focus on PS+ Extra Backlog

I got annoyed with the Sony news and decided to start a physical game instead in Pirate Majima.


3. No more PSN Credit!

Not keen to give Sony any more money given their recent news.


Backlog

PS+ Extra (12) - Cleared out a lot of titles that I have lost interest in playing

Digital Games (46) - Another month with no further additions

PS+ Monthly (13) - Nothing new added

Physical Games (12) - Again, no more purchases

Total = 83 Games


Shopping

2026 Target is spend less than £100 - Total spent £66.00  

No change, nothing purchased
 

Want

Added Momento & Calame to my wishlist.


Bin

Where do I start?

Sony - The death of physical games 

Let's go with Sony news of the end of physical media in 2028.

My initial reaction was what a bunch of idiots! & I still feel angry.

My game shopping process since forever is to buy physical media over digital for all AAA game releases. I don't keep games; I play them and then sell them on to buy the next game.

Digital game shopping started with the Xbox 360 and indie games (my first purchased games were Marble Blast Ultra, Puzzle Quest & Geometry Wars). I don't think I purchased anything on the PS3, and on the PS4 I continued to buy indie titles but did purchase AAA games when they were on sale. To date, Red Dead Redemption 2 was the only game I purchased fully digital on release because I knew I would play it forever. 

So how will not having physical games change my gaming habits?

For now, it doesn't. I have a massive backlog of physical/digital games to enjoy. I'm not buying any more physical or digital games, but going forward I'll continue to purchase older titles on my wishlist on physical media and everything else when it is on sale digitally.

I will be reducing my PS+ subscription down to essentials from premium, mainly because too much choice is dangerous!

After 2028, when AAA games will go fully digital, I will set myself a budget and stick to that; currently, for physical games, that is £25 (occasionally I break this). For digital, I'll probably set the limit lower, like £15 & wait until they are on sale.

I've been a PlayStation gamer (slight blip with the 360 but I ended up finishing that generation on the PS3) since my first JAP imported console, so I'll probably purchase a PS6 console at some point, but if the astronomical figures of £1000! is true, then my day one PS5 console is going to be serving me a lot longer.

 

Sea of Stars (PS5)

A lovely "old school" JRPG with beautiful visuals and a lovely soundtrack but an old school save system that resulted in me losing about 3 hours gameplay because I went exploring and ended up down a cavern surrounded by ant bruisers who kept on re-spawning & eventually died.

For now I've not gone back to the game because to combat this save system I will just end up grinding levels to be over-levelled to ensure I don't die and lose gameplay time.

Raccoin (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Yes! Another incremental clicker game with Luck Be A Landlord/Balatro nods! This one isn’t anything to do with cards or trees though. No, it’s all set around a penny falls machine.

You put coins into it, that pushes coins out. Coins that come out earn you money. Somehow, you make money out of this – unlike a real one – because you have special coins that can be bought between rounds, are stored in an expandable clip, and do magic things. So you can get coins that are rabbits and then fox coins hunt them and increase your score. Or you can electrify coins, or have giant coins, or all sorts.

There’s also a combo meter, which builds as you push coins off the edge and is cancelled if you spend too long between doing so. Build it enough and you trigger a bonus wheel to spin, with “prizes” like more coins or massive towers of coins.

Like other games of this sort, it’s getting the right combination of special coins, a bit of timing, and a lot of luck that allows you to get higher and higher scores on each run. And, like other games of this sort, it’s pretty addictive. Raccoin isn’t as good as Luck Be A Landlord or Balatro, but it is decent enough.

PowerWash Simulator 2 (Steam 2): COMPLETED!

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You’d be hard-pressed, from the screenshots, to see that PowerWash Simulator 2 is actually a different game to PowerWash Simulator 1. And the gameplay too, in fact. After all, there are only so many different ways washing dirty stuff can be presented. Why, then, is this a whole new game and not just another pile of DLC for the original? Money? It’s probably money. Right?

There are differences, if you look closely. Perhaps the biggest, in terms of “gameplay” at least, is how they’ve done away with all the different types of soap. In the first game, different surface types required the purchase and use of specific detergents, so you’d need one for stone and one for metal and one for plastic and so on. Well, not only is there only one soap type now, it’s free and unlimited. Well, you can only have so much splashed on surfaces at any one time, but rinsing it off magically refills it to your washer so it is effectively infinite. This might not sound like much of a change but, in a game with very few possible changes, it’s a game, uh, changer.

I almost completely avoided using soap in the original, because of the cost and fiddly swapping it out and stuff, so cleaning took more “passes” than it could have done. Now, I foamed up everything with gay abandon. Game changer.

Another change is the addition of a new piece of equipment – the swing. You hang it from the top of a flat surface, and sit in it – giving you mostly free movement up, down, left and right to squirt much more easily than you would with ladders or the scaffolding. Both those, and the hilariously useless step-stool, return, but on specific levels the swing is an excellent new bit of kit. Could have really done with that on the tower at the fire station in the original.

There’s also a new plot. The dodgy Mayor is being dodgy, and the gems you recovered in the previous game that were required to keep the volcano in check have been stolen, but ultimately this just manifests as a reason to clean stuff, same as before.

The final change, which may well have been there before but I didn’t make use of it, was single console split screen co-op. I played on the Switch 2 so was disappointed it didn’t support the game share method of giving player 2 a Switch of their own to stream to, but it was still fun and, as you’d expect, halved the time it took to complete levels.

That’s all there is to say, really – it’s more of the same with a few quality of life improvements. Could it have been DLC? Probably. Should it? Well, chances are it’d have been about the same price anyway (I paid £15 for it, but the eShop price is £20) so it doesn’t really matter. It’s more relaxing zen washing, and it’s worth the entry fee, so I don’t actually care. Oh yeah, and there’s a toilet to wash. Winner.

2025 Mosaic Retrospective (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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As I enjoyed Proverbs so much, of course I was going to download this, which is the same sort of puzzle game by the same developer. This time, instead of plague-era images depicting weird proverbs, it’s a collage of representations of events that happened in 2025. Some funny, some stupid, some sad.

I say “the same sort of puzzle game”, but I actually mean “it’s the same game but with different pictures”. Which is exactly what I wanted, so that’s fine, and as a bonus it is completely free. Unfortunately, it suffers from the Impossible To Use On A Steam Deck controls issue that Proverbs also had, but was just as easily fixed to work how I wanted it.