Back in the late 90’s, the PlayStation was the undisputed king of RPGs. And at that time, I was very much just getting into RPGs, so it was like a wonderful playground of discovery. Or something. Alas, I was a poor schmuck kid and could hardly afford to buy every game I wanted, and renting 60-hour RPGs was a ludicrous idea, so many were left behind.
One of those games that I very vividly remember wanting to play was Wild Arms, a JRPG that (seemingly) had a bit of a Western flair to it. The Wild West isn’t a common setting for really any video game genres, never mind RPGs, so the uniqueness of it really stuck in my head. It was never an especially popular game, to my knowledge, so none of my friends had played it either.
Fast forward to 2025. I’m randomly browsing the PS1 Classics available on the PS4’s digital store, and I come across not only Wild Arms, but the second and third games in the series as well. Apparently, I’d seen them there before, too, as the first two games were already purchased; I only had to impulse buy the third. I decided that it was finally time to put this thing to bed and installed Wild Arms on my PS5. Then, to my amazement, I actually started playing it roughly two weeks later.
I haven’t really gotten into the livestreaming thing since 2020, but I have randomly done a couple streams recently. One where I played the entirety of Resident Evil: Director’s Cut (without voice-over) and one where I got lost in the first area of Dreamcore for a couple hours.
Oh, and last night I played up to the hospital in the original Silent Hill2 (with Enhanced Edition mod). There was even a stranger watching and chatting with me briefly. What a rush! I plan to return to the intertubes to finish the game at some point, but when is anybody’s guess.
Another year down, so many video games played… and even more un-played. *sigh* At some point I’ll figure out the “unlimited time” cheat code for life, but until then, let’s strap in for another year of… this.
~ Game Over ~
Mega Man X (SNES) – It’s tradition that this is the first game I play each new year, didn’t you know? This time I played with “rookie hunter” mode enabled on the Mega Man X Legacy Collection, and I still couldn’t get my time down to under an hour! I’m beginning to think that I’m just not capable of such a feat. Oh well.
Resident Evil: Director’s Cut (PSX) – This was launched as bait to get old people to subscribe to the more expensive tiers of PlayStation+. I’m still on the cheapest plan, but now I’m able to play it for reasons I don’t understand. Oh well! This is actually the first time I’ve finished this version of the game, though I have played the GameCube and DS remakes like a thousand times each.
Peglin (PC) – The Cruciball is finally complete. Can I move on with my life now? Peglin says “no.” (And I’m okay with that.)
You know the preamble by now. Let’s jump straight to the good(?) stuff.
Mario & Luigi: Brothership (Switch) – Parts 12-15 run every Saturday from Feb 1st. No surprise, being at part 12 and all. Looks like it’s coming to a head (I just recorded part 15), and I’m pretty confident that this series will end in March.
9 Years of Shadows (PC) – Parts 2-5 run every Monday from Feb 3rd. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I definitely recommend it, as it’s pretty cool game. Very stylish, with some neat powers and tough bosses. This one will definitely conclude in March, with part 7 being the finale.
Bad Parenting #1: Mr. Red Face (PC) – One-shot goes live Feb 6. I thought this was going to be a bit more of a light-hearted spook-em-up, but it’s actually intensely dark. One of the bleakest games I’ve played in recent memory.
DEAD OR SCHOOL (PC) – Parts 4 and 5 on Feb 13 and Feb 27 respectively. I honestly don’t know if this is going to be any fun at all to watch, but I had a grand old time playing it. Check it out if you like seeing me in pain and anime nonsense.
Midnight Prowl (PC) – One-shot goes live Feb 20. Yamoto’s first game, and easily the weirdest of the three. It’s better than Akai Onna, but can’t hold a candle to Urayama. As with most of these games, I put in the effort to get both endings.
As always, any unplanned videos will get their own posts as they go live (or more likely, a few days afterward). That seems a bit unfair, honestly, but what are you going to do? You’re going to subscribe to my channel and hit that notification bell. That’s what you’re going to do.
I don’t exactly know how I got into the market of making video reviews of donuts, but it’s a thing I do somewhat consistently. Weird. Especially when the thumbnail suggests that you’re getting a Pop-Tart review.
I don’t remember when, exactly, but at some point last year, my brother told me about this game called Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. I happened to have my Switch in my hands at the time and immediately looked it up on the shop. Browsing through the screenshots, I could see a game that took place in a mansion with fixed camera angles. That was enough for me to hit the “Buy” button.
Now, months later, I’ve finally played the game. And what a game! Much like the other Simogo games I’ve played, Year Walk and Sayonara Wild Hearts, Lorelei left a huge impression on me. But for completely different reasons! Year Walk scared the piss out of me and had an unforgettable twist during the second half, and Sayonara Wild Hearts’ soundtrack is one of my favourites of all-time. Lorelei, on the other hand, is a gigantic series of interconnected puzzles with a mind-bending story woven throughout them. And, man, that’s just like the perfect recipe for a game for me.
So having played through the whole game to 100% completion, I’m honestly still not entirely sure what the story is trying to tell me. You start off having just arrived at a creepy old hotel/art museum at the behest of its owner. I had presumed that your character was the titular Lorelei, but then you read about Lorelei in notes and actually meet the woman herself, which kind of debunked that notion. But then you get even farther in and some things happen that start to make you think: oh wait, maybe I am Lorelei after all? Are there two Loreleis? Only the ending can tell!
Aside from figuring out what kind of temporal shenanigans may or may not be happening at this hotel, there’s also this sort of sub-plot about art. The dude who invited you to the hotel in the first place, Renzo, is an artist; his medium of choice being film. In notes you read that he’s kind of a kook and that his films are way past avant-garde, and his life goal is trying to make the purest form of art possible, all to spit in the face of Mammon (read: commercialism). The entire game is built around this fascination with art, from the black and white and red graphics to the way the story is told in fractured, often confusing notes and cutscenes, and it even leaks into a lot of the puzzle designs.
Now, you might not think that puzzles are overly artistic, and a lot of them aren’t. In fact, most of them revolve around reading notes to figure out how devices work or simply solving number puzzles to learn the passcode to certain doors. But then you remember that the whole mansion is basically just one giant piece of interactive art, and all of those puzzles have been designed and put there by one or both of the characters who inhabit the hotel. Or maybe the previous owner? It’s still not entirely clear to me.
There’s even one fairly substantial series of puzzles that’s built entirely around art installations and how you view them. These installations provide the combinations to several puzzle boxes that are themselves a separate art installation, which is maybe the masterwork of Lorelei herself? And then you get clues from those puzzle boxes to keywords that will unlock clues for yet another puzzle! It’s really nice that that whole set of interconnected puzzles is tied into the story, makes it feel a lot more satisfying to solve.
As a game that’s built almost entirely around puzzles, there is definitely a wide range of difficulty, as one might expect. Some of the puzzles (particularly the ones that open shortcut doors) are mindlessly simple, and others are likely to stump you for days on end (I had that problem a couple times). There are some puzzles that have very simple solutions, but how you come about those solutions can be maddeningly opaque. For example, the set of puzzles that unlocks the game’s maps are available from basically the very start, and the key to unlocking them is also accessed early, but I was at roughly 60% completion before it occurred to me to put the two together.
Suffice it to say I had an absolute blast with this one. Simply wandering the mansion to search for puzzles and clues is fun, and the sheer number of “A-ha!” moments I had kept the dopamine on a constant flow. The ending is fantastic: both jaw-dropping and bittersweet. And of course, any game that essentially demands that I have a pen and paper on hand to keep notes is a winner in my book. I played several great games like that last year (Animal Well and Tunic, to name a couple), and Lorelei definitely measures up. It might even be my favourite of the bunch because it’s got such a weird flavour to it, which aligns perfectly with my tastes. Somehow the cutscenes and story gave off a strong Killer7 vibe, even though the two games are nothing alike, and I deeply appreciate that.
I wholeheartedly give Lorelei and the Laser Eyes my stamp of approval and certify it as TE’s Game of the Month, January 2025. Not that that’s a thing I’m doing now.
I still don’t like unboxing videos, but I made another one. Why? Because it gave me a great opportunity to talk on and on and on about Ys and how much I like Ys.
I cut out roughly five minutes of me blabbering on like an overexcited fanboy, and it’s still just shy of 14 minutes long. Have you heard the good word of Ys?
I won’t bore you with the nitty-gritty details of my Steam Year in Review report, but it did include this little graph that I thought would be fun to share:
So, according to Steam, these are the tags that come up most often in the games I play. At least, the PC games that I play. And I have to say, it’s pretty spot-on as far as my overall tastes go. Horror is kind of my jam when it comes to PC games, because that’s kind of where the indie horror scene lives. A decent amount trickles over to console, but not nearly the wealth that you’ll find on Steam or Itch.io or etc.
Metroidvanias are definitely what I was into in 2024, but mostly due to circumstance. See, I bought a metroidvania Humble Bundle in either late 2023 or early 2024, and well, time makes fools of us all. The action-adventure tag is usually-but not always-paired with metroidvanias, which explains why that one’s there too. Though I certainly can enjoy a good action-adventure that is not a metroidvania.
Now, the “female protagonist” tag is the most happenchance one of the bunch. I personally will never play or avoid a game solely based on the protagonist’s sex; it doesn’t matter to me in the least. But also, there’s no “male protagonist” tag on Steam, which is pretty darn sexist.
“Relaxing” kind of befuddled me, because the only game of the sort that I could remember playing in 2024 was Unpacking, and that was a three-hour game, so it couldn’t have been the only contributor. So I looked into it, and the answer is that I have a lot of PowerWash Simulator hours logged in 2024. Firewatch might count too; I’m not sure and I’m not going to look it up.
I don’t know how 3D platformer made it onto the graph. The only one I played on Steam in 2024 was Lunistice, and that’s another one that I wrapped in a single three-hour session. Realistically, this point should be higher on the graph, but a) 3D platformers are kind of rare these days and b) 3D platformers are definitely better played on console.
And that’s all I really have to say about that. I set my Year in Review page to be visible to the public, so if you’d like to take a gander at it for yourself, you should be able to find it here. If not… I don’t really know what to tell you.
