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Rental (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Rental is (or at least, was at time of writing, who knows what the Terrifying Future holds) a free game on Steam and nothing is more important in gaming than low, low prices. So why the hell not, eh?

Perhaps the best way to describe the game, assuming you can’t see the screenshots here, is What if Animal Crossing was Resident Evil on the PS1? Or maybe, Silent Hill: Sylvanian Families. It has the cute animals and the quaint little house and then Horrors.

As you take your cute little bunny into this holiday cabin, you quickly realise something isn’t right. In full BBC Ghost Watch style, you catch a glimpse of a thing. Or there’s a noise. Or a voice. It’s a bit creepy, especially given all the tweeity in the graphics.

I won’t spoil what happens, especially as it’s so short so, coupled with the freeness of the game, you’ve no excuse not to discover it for yourself, but after some hunting for items it gets even more disturbing and weird. Do you like cute free games that subvert your expectations and turn disturbing and weird? Then you’ll like Rental.

Cats Hidden in Paris (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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There seems to be a lot of “find the cats hidden in these pictures” games. I’ve played a few recently, but this one is by a different developer, and is one huge picture rather than a series of connected ones (like A Castle Full of Cats). The idea is the same, though.

Not much more to say, really, aside from as well as finding 100 cats, you can also get an achievement for finding 5 gulls. Which I did. It’s free on Steam if you want to play yourself.

Paw Patrol on a Roll (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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No, I’m serious. I really did play and complete Paw Patrol on a Roll. For Science?

You see, one of the ugvm people bought a charity bundle of games and one of those was Paw Patrol on a Roll. As they were clearly above playing it (or even claiming the code) themselves, it was offered up and naturally I took it. Beholden to play it, I did.

It’s a bad game. I don’t think anyone was expecting anything else, what with the source material, the fact it’s a licenced game, and it’s aimed at four year olds. It’s solid, it looks OK, and if you’re a four year old fan of Dogs Pretending To Be Emergency Services I expect this is great, but otherwise? No.

The main issues revolve around the repetitive nature of the levels and – worse – the soundbites. Every five seconds, some kid with an annoying voice exclaims that “You got the pup treats!” or “I detect a gold paw print!” or other stuff you only need to hear once – if at all. Every level is basically the same: Some really, really simple platforming, with the occasional need to call a different dog to come and clear a path. How these dogs manage to drive their truck or fly their helicopter to the point they’re needed when the only way to reach them is on foot (otherwise why wouldn’t you just drive/fly there?) isn’t made clear. In fact, almost every level could be easily completed with just the pink dog and her helicopter flying directly to the point you need to reach, and all that rubbish platforming could be avoided and the game would be over much more quickly.

Am I sad it’s now all over? No. Was it worth the Zero Pence I paid for it? No. Would I recommend this game to anyone? No.

I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1 (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Once upon a time, in a different era, this game was a viral hit on the Xbox Live Arcade Indie Games service. It was that platform within a platform that let pretty much anyone publish games for the Xbox 360 and sell them for peanuts.

Well, I recently discovered it still exists – for free on Steam! And here we are, after I’ve completed it.

In some way, IMAGWZII is a precursor to the modern phenomenon of “survivors” games. It has a lot in common with twin-stick shooters like Geometry Wars or Smash TV, but it feels “primitive” in the same way Vampire Survivors et al do, what with the graphic style and rough edges. And, of course, it has the REALLY LOUD and VERY BAD theme tune that sings over the top of all the shooting, which is the main reason the game went viral in the first place, I’m sure.

Fear for your eyes when this bit gets going.

Completing it was a surprise, as I don’t think I ever did on the Xbox and, actually, I thought it was the sort of game that just went on forever, but apparently not!

Tokyo Xanadu eX+ (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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Persona! There we go. I was going to try not to mention it at all but I realised that would be impossible so thought I’d just come straight out with it. Yes indeed: Tokyo Xanadu is very Persona. Perhaps that is why I enjoyed it so much.

So, stop me when you’ve heard this one before. Some school children who ordinarily wouldn’t mix with each other because one is really shy and one is perceived to be a bully and one is overly peppy and one is a nerd and one is fierce and unapproachable and one is secretly some sort of ninja, are all thrown together when another, evil, world starts to bleed into their own and they go through portals which only they can see to defeat them. All while still trying to live normal lives and go to school and have relationships and do part time jobs and one of them is a famous idol so there’s that going on too. Persona, right?

And I’m perfectly fine with that. It isn’t exactly Persona, with less emphasis on building bonds between characters (although the game does touch on that a bit) and the combat is all real-time and not turn-based, but the format and the feel of the game is just the same. The combat is fast and controls well in terms of pulling off combos and special moves, swapping characters for different elemental attacks. There’s loads of customisation you can delve into for the weapons too, with each having a number of slots to which you can apply effects and upgrade those effects. I didn’t get too deep into that but I’d imagine it’s essential on the harder difficulty settings.

One downside is that the bits of platforming in some of the “dungeons” is clunky in that way that Japanese games which aren’t platformers but have platforming sections tend to be. Imprecise and wonky. Thankfully, there’s not a lot of it although one of the final dungeons uses it a lot. You don’t die by falling off, but you do waste so much time doing it over and over.

Speaking of final dungeons, Tokyo Xanado eX+ (perhaps specifically the eX+ release, as it has more content) has multiple endings, just like Persona. There’s the normal ending, but there’s the true ending after that, and then the real_true_final_ending_(2)_FINAL_use this one.docx ending. The road to the proper real good final one actually adds about 5-6 hours to the story, which was a sizable 65-70 hours already. It’s a big game! Like Persona.

Is it as good as Persona (4 Golden specifically), though? Well, in some ways. It’s faster paced, and has better graphics. It doesn’t have the incredibly stylish UI though, and the characters in Persona 4, perhaps because you get to know them more intimately, are mostly much more memorable. There’s less of a fear that by doing the wrong thing or by missing some conversation that you’re going to lock off the best ending in Tokyo Xanadu, although I suspect that’s possible, it just seems harder to miss if you just follow everything rather than try to do specific things at specific times like in Persona.

No, that didn’t answer the question, did it. I enjoyed both games a lot. I’ll bung Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE into the mix as well, as that was my first Persona (even though it wasn’t really Persona but sort of was a spin off of a different branch of the same series as Persona). They’re all great, and they’re all similar, but the differences don’t make any one notably better than the others. Buy them all, eh? Why not.