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Little Kitty Big City: completed!

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There was an update, and there’s a definite improvement to control responsiveness and general collision detection. It’s still a bit fiddly at times and sometime it just doesn’t respond to button presses – particularly when trying to pull items around – but overall it’s much more playable.

The overarching story – of having fallen down from your cosy perch, and having to make your way back up the building – provided enough impetus to make me want to seek out new abilities and areas. I met a tanooki who transported me 2 metres into a bin, but this indicated that there may be more teleportation in the future. I found a beetle who’d dropped his phone in concrete, who needed a new one – that unlocked photo mode. I found a chameleon who is particularly bad at hiding. I found sparkling areas which allowed me to take a nap. I found a worried duck who’d lost his ducklings, and he game me a useful map. Eventually I found a fish which I ate, which gave me the ability to climb ivy for a short way.

The map showed me where the other fish were. I suddenly became very interested in finding fish.

Each of the fish required a little puzzle. In the shop, I had to find some way to distract the shopkeeper before jumping into the fridge and wolfing the fish down. On a roof garden, I had to turn off a hose to prevent the fish’s owner spraying me. Each fish I ate gave me more stamina to climb. After collecting all the fish, I knew I could make it to the top of the building, and back home.

Of course, I didn’t do that immediately. I found a few more hats, and explored the world some more. I spent ages trying to find a clever way into a fenced-off area on the edge of the map, before noticing there was a little gap between the fence and the wall (left below); I also spent ages trying to catch a bird with a ring around its neck, who’d land in a specific spot but fly off almost immediately (right below).

But it was time to climb. The journey up the tower was largely uneventful, although I did get lost in the scaffolding a couple of times. With four stamina bars I had just about enough to climb onto an air conditioning unit near the top, and then I was home.

The ending was very sweet – being given a collar, congratulations by the crow, and then another nap on the windowsill.

I can jump down again to complete missions, find more hats, and steal more smartphones before dropping them in puddles. I need to find two more rubber ducks to throw in the pond, and another football and goal combination, among other side missions. For now, though, this is completed.

Farming Simulator 22: not farming

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Nicholas’s current great interest is Farming Simulator 22, after he has seen a fair few videos on YouTube talking about the array of machinery you can drive around. He has been keen to get me involved in a multiplayer game, and after weeks of putting it off, here we are.

It took us 20 minutes to get a game set up, mainly because he’s installed all sorts of mods and DLC onto his Steam game, which aren’t available on the Xbox (or, in some cases, I hadn’t installed them), meaning our games were incompatible. We worked out what we needed to do in the end, and so I entered the farm with some trepidation over exactly which crops I’d be harvesting or sowing or watering or whatnot.

I needn’t have worried. This wasn’t a simulation of farming, it was a simulation of driving around a town in big expensive machines, blocking roads, turning other vehicles over, and generally causing havoc. The farm we inherited had large fields of sunflowers and wheat, which were wrecked as two large tractors had a (slow) race through them. An irrigation machine with large arms was used to block roads. Combine harvesters pushed over quad bikes.

We parked a few vehicles on the train tracks, not expecting a train to come past. For some reason vehicles clip straight through your avatar, but interact directly with other vehicles. We found that there was a large beetroot-picking machine balanced on top of a house.

It’s all a bit silly. I asked Nicholas if we could actually try harvesting the sunflowers, and he tried to buy the right equipment and it still didn’t work. So he concreted over the field instead, so we had more space to park vehicles. As long as I don’t drive more of them into the river.

A Monster’s Expedition (Through Puzzling Expeditions) (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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I maintain that I am not really a fan of sokoban type puzzle games, and yet somehow, I seem to enjoy them. Perhaps it’s just when there are crate-pushing puzzles in otherwise crate-push-free games that I don’t like?

In any case, A Monster’s Expedition was one of the ones I did enjoy. You are a monster, who navigates islands which seem to make up a sort of Museum of Humans, as there are many artefacts (sometimes amusingly mislabelled as to their purpose) to be found. The game, however, isn’t about finding the artefacts – it’s about finding a way to leave the islands completely.

To do that you have to reach a ferry, and to reach the ferry you have to complete crate-pushing puzzles on each island in order to open paths, build log bridges, or make rafts to get around. Of course, they’re not crates you have to push: they’re trees.

You can chop down trees, then push the trunks as logs. If you push them sideways, they roll until they hit something or fall in the water, and if you push them lengthways they flip up on end and then over onto their side again. These, plus the double-height trees and some rocks, make up the majority of the puzzles and they’re all about trying to get logs into certain positions on each island to progress.

It’s simple, although many of the puzzles are not. Later on, you discover a few meta-puzzles, where there’s a collection of islands to solve, but not just to allow you to move between them – you have to make way for a log that needs to traverse the islands and bridges you’ve made too, which may mean the solution you had originally may not be enough for the log as well.

A Monster’s Expedition is a nice little (well, not little – it’s bloody huge) brain-scratcher, with a bit of humour and some fiendish puzzles. Oh, and if you’ve bought the itch.io Palestinian Relief bundle, you already own it!

Rise of the Tomb Raider: completed!

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I decided to play on. Ammo was a little depleted, but I had plenty of materials to craft arrows, and I was sure that soldiers would provide me with plenty of bullets. In fact, as I arrived atop the tower, I saw multiple ammo drops in any case, and started to run towards them.

I didn’t get there before the cutscene started. I am not averse to big end battles, as they can set the end of a game nicely. I don’t like huge difficulty spikes, and I don’t like when the skills required for the boss are completely different to those in the game as a whole. To a minor extent, these both applied here. Konstantin appeared in a helicopter, guns blazing, trying to get rid of Lara. Luckily Sofia was still at the trebuchet; unluckily she was unable to hit the moving helicopter. Instead, in a massive nod to realism, after she fired a blazing barrel towards the helicopter, I had to shoot that barrel when it was nearby, causing an explosion that rocked the flying menace. And I had to do that three times, because we all know that helicopters can survive two explosions. And between the helicopter’s appearances, the Deathless Dumbos and Trinity Tosspots all swarmed around the structure trying to kill me.

Luckily I soon found ways to avoid them – running away to an outer ledge, shooting the burning trays over the tops of their heads, and using poison and exploding arrows. It was intense, though, and I was glad to see the helicopter finally on fire and about to crash.

Into me. Into the tower. Oh dear.

So I end up in a burning room with Konstantin, who has obviously survived the crash, taking all my weapons. I have to avoid his machine gun fire and grenades, while running around finding tin cans to craft into explosives and then hitting him with my ice pick. Luckily there were some clear instructions on what I needed to do.

Eventually he submitted to multiple stab wounds, and I took my stuff back from him. And then he begged me to not leave him to die. I had a choice – there was the symbol over his head indicating a kill, but instead I just walked away.

And then the building collapsed on him anyway. Oh well.

Off to the Chamber of Souls to find the Divine Source, and there I find Ana who is desperate not to die. She has the Source, there is a fair amount of back-and-forth, the Deathless Dimwits appear in force and everything is going to be awful. Until Lara lifts up the Source over her head and smashes it. The Deathless become Dead, but so does Jacob, and everything is a bit sad. Game complete.

All being completed, I travel back to the geothermal springs valley to tidy up some loose ends, and hear some interesting post-game conversations. I may return at some point to find the secrets I missed, and complete the side missions left over, but this feels like a good time to stop.

Aero the Acro-Bat: diagonal attacks

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In the rash of character-based platformers following the rivalry of Sonic and Mario, there must have been many which were unfairly overlooked. Aero is not one of these; it sold well enough to get a sequel, so was not overlooked; and if it had been so it wouldn’t have been unfairly.

Maybe I am being a little harsh; I have only played the first five levels to far, but they are all in the circus and I am longing for some variety in the setting already. My main complaint is with the way that Aero attacks enemies, and controls in general. The control layout indicates that button A is reserved for “fire”, but I have found no way to actually fire anything. Instead, I am forced to use a drill-type attack that goes either diagonally down or diagonally up, and half the time doesn’t hurt the enemy at all (but still hurts me).

A great platform game lives or dies on the accuracy of the jumps and the momentum the character has. Aero is competent enough, but it’s not fun to control – plus there are frequently unavoidable deaths from going too fast or due to trampolines launching you into spikes off-screen. Luckily for present-day me, save states make this a lot more bearable.