My Great Splurge of What I’ve Been Playing Part Two

Since I have not updated on what I have been playing since about September, here is the update for the last few months!

To end 2019, I got through three games: Ori & The Blind Forest, Disco Elysium, and Her Story. Beginning 2020 I’ve finished off Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Life Is Strange 2, The Last of Us, and began my 2020 video game goal of trying to finish all mainline Mario games.

Now, Ori & The Blind Forest was a beautiful game that was a challenging experience which I appreciated. If you haven't heard about Ori & The Blind Forest, it is a 2D Metroidvania game that involves some platforming elements.

The combat was interesting enough to get me invested in its intricacies. You upgrade the beams you use to fight, by spending skill points at your save points you create within the world. You gain blue orbs to save by fighting enemies, but these same blue orbs are spent by using charged attacks, so it is a pick and choose of when to use your blue orbs for a specific way. A very enjoyable game I recommend! Especially since the sequel, Ori & The Will of the Wisps, is being released in March.

The first game I was interested in playing when I got a gaming laptop was Disco Elysium. The buzz I heard leading towards me getting a gaming laptop was a lot. It was out around the time Outer Worlds came out, another RPG I fell in love with. Disco Elysium though is different.

It probably had the best writing of any game I played in 2019, truly. The dialogue for all the characters you interact with is so intrinsic and so important to your overall character’s story and the overwhelming mystery through the game. You play as a detective, who happens to be a heavy alcoholic. The game starts with you waking up in your hotel room in your underwear and you have lost your memory from how drunk you got the entire weekend when you were supposed to be investigating a scene in the town. So, pretty crazy and comical stuff comes out of all this.

Her Story was the final game I completed in 2019. Very short one-night investigative game. You search throughout a police database looking through several videos seeing what happened to a missing man. I can definitely see why it garnered so much Game Award attention in 2015, so I highly recommend it if you have an hour or two to spare!

Then came 2020, the beginning of a new decade. My gaming resolution for the year is to finish 35-40 games, but also play through all mainline Mario games. The reason for this is because I have never finished a Mario game other than Super Mario Odyssey when it came out on the Switch, which is crazy. It would be easier to say what games I am not counting on this journey. I will not be playing the Paper Mario series, or any RPG Mario game that he is involved in, so I am sorry to Mario & Luigi. The Mario & Donkey Kong series, that is also a no.

So this journey began with playing Super Mario Bros. 1 in one night while taking two nights to play through Super Mario Bros. 3. Now, Super Mario Bros. 2 I played through World 5 before Super Mario Bros. 3, then I accidentally overwrote my save. So, I went onto Super Mario Bros. 3, but I did eventually finish off Super Mario Bros. 2. So, the first three games of this journey are done! Currently crawling through Super Mario World and then off to Super Mario 64!

To prepare myself for the greatness that will be The Last of Us Part II, I chose to go through the first one, since I haven’t played it all the way through since its release in 2013. Which is quite a while for a game I love. The story is still emotionally taxing and amazing. Every nonchalant conversation with Ellie is incredible and just adds more to the relationship with her and Joel. I am now mentally ready for The Last of Us Part II like I was before. However, now just more story ready!

On the opposite spectrum of playing games that are chronologically prior to a future game, I chose to play Life Is Strange 2 since the final episode was released in the middle of December! Now, this was another emotionally taxing game because of the relationship you build with the Diaz brothers and every character you meet in each separate episode. The technical issues that arose while playing the first Life Is Strange are now non-existent and the game runs more fluidly and a ton better, so bless DontKnod’s souls and their new engine.

The choices you make have more consequences since you can’t turn back time this time. They just don’t affect you this time, the choices affect your brother too, which is so awesome and adds so much pressure. It is definitely up there with the first Life Is Strange to me. However, it hasn’t topped Before the Storm for me yet, but I feel Life Is Strange 1 and Before the Storm switches a lot in my head of the hierarchy. But! I recommend it if you love the Life Is Strange series!

I received Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order for Christmas, so sadly I had to wait to play this game when it came out in November. However! The wait was definitely worth my time! This game shows how much I am starting to love Respawn as a developer. Even with them being owned by EA.

The combat is the first thing that was emphasized when the game was fully revealed and talked about, it was influenced by Batman: Arkham Asylum since a lot of people who worked on that game are on the development team of Fallen Order, makes sense. The influence definitely shows and it is amazing. You are basically in a duel each fight like in Batman and it feels great to do that with a lightsaber.

The gameplay resembles a lot of Metroidvania features, in ways you have to traverse back to an area after you gain a new ability which is some of my favorite stuff as I go into more of that genre of games in my life. Now, those two things happen to be things I love in the game industry in general: Batman Arkham Asylum and Metroidvanias. So, with the added mix of Star Wars added in there, I probably assumed I would love this game before I got it.

I loved the story in the game also. It presented a lot of awesome surprises in the Star Wars world itself while still being its own game and not going into known things unless it involved the overall story. Each surprise they added was amazing in the amount of meaning behind it. Not forcing things into games! Kal and the droid, BD-1, are a beautiful tandem that I need more of. So, Respawn put them back in the sequel in some way at least.

Those games have all been played within the last two months for me! So I highly recommend them all if you feel like embracing those games! Until next time!