I set myself some pretty lenient rules with the backlog clearing: 6 hours or “the ending” knocks it off the list as a victory. Here is some of the stuff that I could not even muster up that meager amount for so far. Keep in mind that for all my bitching, I cleared Sacred 3 and, this one’s gonna get its own post in a couple of days, Resident Evil 6, so it’s not like my bar is amazingly high on this project… and yet these didn’t even manage to make it.
Matris
Matris feels like an early access puzzle game. There’s a concept here, but practically nothing to do. The four modes are “Puzzle”, where you try to cover the entire board (with medals at 90, 95, and 100%), “Combo” (score attack), “Time Attack” (take a guess), and “Free Play”, which is basically a modified Combo with occasional special spaces. In non-Puzzle modes, you’re forced to make every successive piece start within one square of the last one you placed, which is how you end combos when you run out of moves and it clears your mass for bonuses.
And that’s it. There’s nothing competitive, different boards don’t do anything to shake it up aside from making you work carefully on a few spots, and high scoring in Free Play is entirely RNG based since the special spaces go between positive and negative and hitting one can either propel you to victory or fuck you.
There are leaderboards for Free Play/Time Attack, but very few people seem to give a damn on them: flailing through Free Play for about five minutes earned me #38 worldwide out of a total of 115 players (and you can’t view the leaderboards in the game at all – only via Steam’s game page). I can’t blame them, this isn’t a title I’m going to revisit.
Tapped out at: 4.4 hours/6 hours
Lines X
It should be very clear I love me some casual games. After work/before bed, I tend to do a little bit of wind-down with some puzzle title or a quick run of something low-impact. I’ve even been known to engage in those “hidden object” games here and there. In theory, this should mean Lines X would be another title like Sudoku Universe where I’m gonna mark it done after 6 hours and continue playing it here and there for this very reason.
See those colored dots above? Your goal is to connect all same-colored dots in such a way the entire board is covered when all have been paired off. How do you fuck this up?
For some fucking reason, this game blasts you with sets of achievements after every puzzle. At first they were just letters of various alphabets and I thought “oh, that’s cute, I can spell some stuff out on my Steam profile with this now”.
And then came the words. Like the above. I probably would have considered this an unfortunate use of a dictionary, but then I decided I was going to try and clear one more puzzle so that when I woke up, “Most Recent: Rape” wasn’t staring me in the face.
When a puzzle game goes out of its way to insult me, I am entirely okay just binning the bastard.
Tapped out at: 14 minutes/6 hours and 120/590 achievements, at least ten of which were just an algorithm giving me the middle finger
Rapture Rejects
This one is pretty easy, it’s a story in two parts:
So yeah, that’s not happening for reasons of impossibility.
Tapped out at: ∞ minute wait time/6 hours