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A Tiny Sticker Tale (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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And the first completed game of 2024 is… A Tiny Sticker Tale! Which you already knew because that’s the title of this post. Free on Amazon or Epic or something (it’s hard to track these days), A Tiny Sticker Tale was on my Switch eShop wishlist following John Walker’s enthusing on his blog. But since it was free elsewhere, and Steam Deck-able, I moved there instead.

It’s not often I have to rush to complete a game. With this one, I started playing it and my daughter’s ears pricked up and she came over and started to play it vicariously so I had to send her away and tell her to wait her turn while I ran through it as there’s only one save game slot. OK, so it wasn’t exactly a rush, as the game is only a few hours long anyway, but I don’t think I touched on everything.

The ‘hing with A Tiny Sticker Tale is that you pick up items, objects and characters as stickers, put them in your scrapbook, then take them out and use them elsewhere. For example, there’s a river on one of the screens which you can’t cross, but there’s a bridge on another. Unstick the bridge, take it to the river, and plonk it down. Most of the puzzles work in similar ways, a ladder to climb cliffs, or places you have to take the animal characters to.

There’s a fun bit of inventory management (no, really) as you’ve only limited space in your scrapbook and some of the stickers are huge, so you have to move them all around. I realised you can, if you’re careful, make them overhang the pages somewhat, increasing what you can “carry”, but even then, you sometimes have to swap out things. Especially if you’re carrying trees.

None of the puzzles are especially difficult, and I expect some people will find the game excruciatingly twee, but I enjoyed the laid-backness of it, the art style, and the silly characters you meet.

Shadows Over Loathing (Switch): COMPLETED!

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I really enjoyed West of Loathing, so I’m not sure why I took so long to get round to the sequel (actually, I do – All The Games). And what a game it is.

Well, it’s the same as the previous game. Of course, it isn’t, but everything that was great about that is still great here. Time has moved on a bit, so instead of being set in the Old West, Shadows Over Loathing is set in The Big City, in the 1920s. Not the real 1920s, of course, because they didn’t use meat as currency then, nor did they have faeries that stab you, algebra that tries to kill you, time travel portals, or people who had been turned into frogs and frogs that had been turned into people. And lots of tentacles. Yes, there’s a Day of the Tentacle reference. And a Fallout one. And many others, including some that mention the events and locations of West of Loathing.

The game opens with you receiving a letter from your uncle. He needs your help, so you get the bus to the city, only to break down on the way and when you finally get to his office, he’s gone missing and all your luggage bursts into flames. Uncle’s colleagues let you in on what he’s been investigating, and it’s mainly regarding cursed items. You need to find them, un-curse them, and then you might figure out what’s going on. Naturally, it’s not as simple as that as the story goes all over the place, with trips to a weird university (which has a Spider Wing, a BBQ Wing and an infinitely long corridor in amongst the buildings) where you must graduate, a town called Sandwich which is currently a museum but you need to solve some mysteries by travelling to the past, a swamp where two rival families run a fishing business, with one family deboning the fish, and the other re-boning them. There’s a man who wants to reward you for each photo he takes of you in a different hat. There are vampires. There’s a flooded lighthouse, but not because it’s under water – it’s just filled with water. There’s a hobo village you can grow and populate with a diverse array of hobos. You can fish for… stuff in puddles and buckets and toilets. Toilets! So many toilets. If you flush them, you get XP. It’s like the game was made just for me.

I’ve not even mentioned the combat, for this is a full-on RPG with stats and turn based fighting and items you can equip and upgrade. You can enlist a character to fight alongside you too, and you’ve always got one of a number of familiars who can buff you or heal you. As I said in my comments on the previous game, not only is it hilarious, nonsensical and silly, but the game is actually a great game as well. Every wall of text is worth reading. Every character is worth conversing with. Every item is worth examining. There’s so much genuinely funny stuff here that it’s easy to forget that the mechanics are polished and enjoyable too.

I could talk about events I came across (like meeting your future self, handing him 300 meat, then later on having to hand it back to your past self) but there are so many I’d be here forever and, if you’ve not played it, you’d miss the joy of finding them all yourself. If you have any affinity for the funny, you absolutely must play Shadows Over Loathing.

Vivitter (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Sometimes I have a poke around on the Japanese eShop to see if there’s anything interesting which isn’t on the UK or US one. In the past it has given me the likes of Kamiko, Plantera and Handy Mahjongg, all before they came to the west. I’ve also played a few of the train sim demos, had a go on Phantasy Star Online, and so on. And picked up Sonic the Hedgehog from there as it came out a day early in Japan.

So this time, I found Vivitter. The screenshots and video were utterly nuts, and there was a whole WarioWare/Ichidant-R feel to it. Instant purchase. Oh wait! It’s free? Even better!

Turns out that yes, it is a combination of those two games. You have to do something with very little preparation, with the aim to be as accurate as possible. For example, one of the first games requires you to stop a guillotine blade as close to your neck as possible. Too far away, and you don’t score enough points to win. Too close, and, well. You can guess.

Are the variations on this theme, stop the thing on the line, let go of the button at the right time, stop a thing at the right distance, time, angle or speed, and so on. After every so many games, you have to do a “final” round, where three of the previous games are chosen at random to play one after the other, and you’ve a total target score to beat in order to proceed. It’s silly, stupid fun. I especially like that you create your face at the start, and then this is badly superimposed over the “hero’s” face in each scenario regardless of how ridiculous that looks. I also enjoyed the games which riff on films like The Matrix, Back to the Future and Mission Impossible.

Castlevania Legends (Switch): COMPLETED!

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I always thought that Castlevania Legends was actually the same game as either of the Game Boy Castlevania Adventure games, just named differently in a other regions. So imagine my surprise when I discovered it wasn’t, and not only that, it’s better than either of them. How have I not played this before?

OK, I should clarify that it still isn’t great. It’s pretty short, has a really restrictive time limit on each level which pretty much guarantees at least one death, and is still a bit clunky. But! It is more fun, slicker, and more playable than the others.

Apparently, until the terrible Lament of Innocence on the PS2, this was chronologically the first game in the series, although when the PS2 game was released Legends became, well, a legend. Shame, as this is a better game than that. Hell, most games are a better game than Lament of Innocence.

There’s not much else to say here. It’s a reasonable Castlevania with nothing really new for anyone who has played any of the original non-Metroidvania style ones before. And it’s free to play if you have the Nintendo Online subscription.

Koa and the Five Pirates of Mara (Switch): COMPLETED!

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There’s a whole series of games set in the “Mara” universe, by Chibig, most of which I’ve played and completed and enjoyed. They’re not the same, although most are of the “chop chop, dig dig” genre. A couple of years ago I played Summer in Mara, which was that and also a boating, exploration game with missions and stuff. This game, takes Koa – the main character from Summer in Mara – and puts her in the same world but now it’s a platformer. And a sequel. Sort of.

There’s a plot about pirates setting you challenges, but ultimately it’s a pretty standard 3D jump and run game with a nice setting, some silly characters, and slightly clunky physics in that way that nobody who isn’t Nintendo can make a platformer that feels great like a Nintendo platformer. It doesn’t do anything new or adventurous with the genre, and isn’t outstanding in any way, but that’s OK – it’s all happy fun stuff to the end.