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Lego Horizon Adventures (PS5): COMPLETED!

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Had some time off ill (yay crippling Covid!) with my daughter so found this cheap to play through together whilst exhaustion drained my life force. It’s a Lego reimagining of the PlayStation Horizon Zero Dawn game, only isn’t really like all the many other Lego games by TT Games perhaps because it isn’t by TT Games. You still go through levels, smashing some Lego stuff and sometimes building Lego stuff, but really it’s more about the combat sections and story.

There’s none of the thing from the other games where you gradually unlock characters that in turn allow you to access new areas or collect things or whatever. You get four characters which can all access everything but have a different weapon each. There’s really no reason to play it through more than once, and we managed to complete it in under 4 hours and then mop up all the achievements and challenges and 100% everything in under 8 in total, so it’s really, really short for a Lego game – even the shortest of the others are over 15 and most are over 30. Still, it was cheap and fun. And now I want to play the Big Boy Horizon Zero Dawn game. Hmm.

August 2025 – It’s going to be a takedown!

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Yes I've watched K-Pop Demon Hunters!

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Fantasy Life I (PS5)

It's been a while since I have played an Animal Crossing/Stardew Valley style cosy game. Fantasy Life I has many different classes from fishing, combat to crafting.
 
 
 
Ghostwire Tokyo (PS5) - Completed
 
The last few boss battles were a bit challenging but completed last month, there were still many activities left on the map but I am not a fan of the Ubisoft style of filling a map with icons.
 
Backlog

Shopping

Added Fantasy Life I & Indiana Jones & the Great Circle.

I spent a bit of time sorting out my PlayStation Library into Subscription, Monthly & Purchased games. Currently sitting at 93 games!

I'll focus on the subscription games before they leave the service.  

Want

A few more titles added to my wish-list in Promise Mascot Agency & Thank Goodness you're here.

Bin

Stick drift, one of my PS5 controllers has started to drift.

Picross S5 (Switch): COMPLETED!

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There is nothing to say about Jupiter’s Picross series that I haven’t already said. There’s not much new here that hasn’t been done before, it’s just more brain-wrinkling and relaxing (at the same time, somehow) picross puzzles.

One thing I would like, perhaps, is fewer of the 5×5, 10×10 and even 15×15 puzzles, and more of the 40×30 ones. There are only a handful here, and you only get them if you have save data from previous games in the series, but I’d love to spend an hour on each of these rather than two or three minutes (or two or three seconds, on 5×5 puzzles) on 20 or 30 smaller ones.

Oh, and S5 has both a toilet and toilet paper pictures. Win.

Night in the Woods (PS5): COMPLETED!

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After finishing Xenoblade Chronicles X, I was at a loss as to what to play next. I didn’t fancy another 125+ hour epic, so had a flick through what I had installed, and came across Night in the Woods. I’d looked at it before but hadn’t realised I owned it (well, PS+ rented it anyway), and I found it was only a few hours long, so here we are.

It starts with you, an anthropomorphic cat coming back to her home town after dropped out of “school”. I say “school” because it’s a university, and it irks me when people refer to university as school. Anyhoo, Mae turns up at her parents’ house and the first few days involve her reintegrating back into her family and the friends she’d left behind, rejoining her band and hanging out and doing things she used to do as a young teen even though she’s now 20 years old.

Soon it is clear there’s something very wrong with her. She gets headaches, but she’s also constantly tired, has bad dreams, doesn’t want to talk about her reasons for ditching uni and for some reason is happy to jump on rooftops and balance on power lines. Because of course. At the same time, you get to know more about Possum Springs, her run-down town which used to be a thriving and prosperous mining town but now all the work as dried up, the shops are closed or closing, some folk have gone missing, and there’s just nothing to do and everyone is a bit miserable. Oh, and sinkholes keep opening up.

Then Mae sees a ghost kidnap a child.

Or did she? Or is she just going a bit mad and it’s a symptom of everything else she’s struggling with? Things aren’t clear until they are and even then it isn’t entirely.

As a sort of platforming puzzle visual novel, Night in the Woods somehow manages to feel laid back but full of existential dread at the same time. Light hearted banter belies the truly horrific things happening in the town, and the feeling that summat just int right. It’s a great story with some great characters. And a Guitar Hero mini game because why not?

Return to Ravenhearst: completed!

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Back in 2016 there was a sale on the 3DS eShop which included a few hidden object games. This wasn’t a genre I had a lot of experience with, but I quite fancied trying it; and at £1 each there wasn’t a huge financial risk. I bought Ravenhearst, and since it was only another pound, the sequel Return to Ravenhearst. I then played Ravenhearst occasionally over the next seven years or so, largely regretting my purchases.

It turns out that hidden object games are OK. I enjoy the scavenger hunts included in Two Dots; there were parts in the Layton games with similar mechanics. The issue is that I don’t like too much of them. I quickly got bored of the format, after a few puzzles, which is why it took many years to complete the first game.

The biggest issue with the Ravenhearst games is that they were made for the PC, and have been shoehorned onto the 3DS. There are lots of games which have great conversions; these aren’t a good example. The pictures you have to search for are fuzzy and indistinct; what’s more, the list of objects you have to find is frequently vague. The objects are early 20-century in style (meaning that if you are told to search for a phone it is often one that has the separate speaker), and use the American terms for things. Being asked to search for a “top” was an exercise in frustration, particularly when the eventual item looked nothing like a spinning top anyway.

The first game was restricted to the hidden objects puzzles, with occasional jigsaws which progressed the story. The sequel has expanded the scope a lot, to the point where there is now a whole map to explore, with a subterranean town accessed beneath the manor’s fireplace, and you find hidden object puzzles by searching for the sparkles. Completing the puzzle gives you an object, and you have to use these objects to progress, either directly or by using them in a different type of puzzle contraption. Again, these contraptions are very difficult to use because you often can’t see the buttons due to screen resolution. There are often clues written around the puzzles as well, but in some cases these were again unclear.

In the end I followed a walkthrough to complete the game. I got stuck at a point where I’d opened a new location, in a cemetery overlooking some cliffs, but there seemed to be nothing I needed there. I had found a puzzle over the fireplace which required a sun and a moon, and I had found the moon, but searching everywhere revealed no sun. Following the walkthrough, I was supposed to notice that the cemetery is overgrown near the tree, and then use the shears I found previously to cut it down – but I had to use them three times, and there was no noticeable difference in scenery after I used them once. Even if I had guessed this was what I had to do, after the first attempt I wouldn’t have tried again.

The game took quite some time to finish, even while following the walkthrough, and the story turned quite unpleasant. Finding the tomb for a woman and her twin daughters, who the manor’s owner had used to gain life force for him and his (unrequited) love, was pretty disturbing. Releasing their ghosts was creepy – even though I had to read about that in the walkthrough to understand what the fuzzy visuals were meant to be showing.

I don’t think I’ll bother with any of the other games in the series.