July sure was a month that… had games? Yeah not really. I actually planned on having one more game in this, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess… but that had a demo so I tried the demo and… yeah that didn’t feel fun at all, unfortunately. I did try a few other demos, specifically Trepang2 and Mullet MadJack, those were really good, though I’m keeping them on the backburner for now as far as getting the full games.

So outside of Mahjong, and getting back into Balatro a bit… there was not much else, I only had 2 full new games to talk about for this post. Oof.

Well let’s go I guess…

Dread Delusion

I had that on my wishlist but kinda missed that it had come out in May. This is a first-person action RPG in the veins of something like Morrowind, but not quite as deep. It uses very “primitive” 3D graphics that are super colorful and in your face despite the horror-ish style of both the world and enemies. You play as a prisoner of some description who is basically forced by whoever imprisoned you to help deal with a pirate woman or whatever who is trying to do something that might destroy the world maybe.

You don’t level up by killing enemies, but rather by either finding skull things and completing quests, which give you delusion points which you can put in 4 stats (each stat powers up 2 other stats, like strength powers up attack and defense). You do also have a bit of a class system so you get a bonus on a few things early on which is good, though eventually you can basically switch your build around entirely by just switching hats. Need to talk to someone? Put on the charm hat in case you get a charm check. Need to lockpick? Put on the lockpick hat. Want to run more and not fight as much? Put on the agility armor because it reduces stamina usage. Get the “not enough lore” message when trying to activate things? Put on the lore hat (and drink some mushroom tea). The most important stat for a lot of the game is probably the one that increases charm, just to get some of the quest shit done more easily.

The overall gameplay is basically traveling around a somewhat large open world, finding quests, doing quests, finding stuff to power up, and sometimes making different story choices (which do affect the ending a little bit). The combat is very simple (and it has a parry system I literally never used) and very easy but functional, the puzzling around is fairly simplistic but engaging, and the story is as okay as it gets (there’s lots of lore I didn’t read though so maybe it’s better with the lore? Without it the writing is a bit weird). It’s very oldschool, to the point where there’s no waypoints for anything (not even manual waypoints), the map has to be filled out semi-manually (you need to find landmarks and note them down in a notebook, then the map people will update your map as needed), and you don’t even have an in-game compass (you get a compass item you need to take out and actually use like a real compass… oh and fuck you if you want to use it while driving your flying boat).

I’d give this a mild recommendation. I had fun with it but by the end I feel like it overstayed its welcome (my playthrough took 23 hours and there’s a few quests I didn’t end up doing). If you want a pretty cool oldschool-ish experience it’s worth checking out.

Nintendo World Championship NES Edition

I actually got the special edition for this. It’s pretty nice, the cartridge is cool and the art cards and pins are well made.

The game itself, pretty fun. It’s like a less fun version of NES Remix, since there’s no remixing. You have 13 first-party NES games to do a bunch of speedrunning challenges in. They’re generally pretty simple, such as finding an item or doing some of the game’s basic actions, and it ups the challenge every time, up to a final challenge that gives a bigger bit of the game, or some key boss battles. You get awarded a rank based on how fast you do it, up to S. They’re mostly pretty short challenges but there’s a few more involved ones. Mario 1’s final challenge is literally to speedrun the whole game using warps (some speedrunning tricks do not work (wrong warps and wall zips), some do (the pipe jump does, not sure what else)), Mario 3’s is to finish just the first world (which isn’t much longer than Mario 1 with warps), Metroid’s is the escape sequence, Kirby is the level that’s basically the entirety of the GB game, Kid Icarus and Zelda 1 and Zelda 2 are all their first dungeon… That kinda stuff. Some games have more challenges than others, with Excitebike having the least and I think Mario 3 having the most. It’s pretty straightforward, and if I paid into online play scams there’d be a bit more to do (never pay for online, it’s stupid). Overall I had lots of fun with this, even if it’s very straightforward.

Excitebike is fucking hard man. I literally only have S rank on the first track, I am terrible at that game, only A++ ranks on the other tracks, terrible.