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Also included, because lets be 100% honest no matter what you call them, the DLCs are identical gameplay just with different maps:

• PowerWash Simulator – Midgar Special Pack
• PowerWash Simulator – Santa’s Workshop – Winter 2023
• PowerWash Simulator – Tomb Raider Special Pack
• PowerWash Simulator – Cruise Ship Sun Deck – Summer 2024
• PowerWash Simulator: Muckingham Files – Part 1
• PowerWash Simulator: Muckingham Files – Part 2
• PowerWash Simulator: Muckingham Files – Part 3
• PowerWash Simulator: Muckingham Files – Part 4
• PowerWash Simulator: Odd Jobs

And yes I did track these all separately, they are not part of the “9 (12)”, but are part of the total games beaten this year. No I’m not including them on my “end of year rating” (EoY Rating) because… again they’re the same game as the base game just more maps. No matter how they’re bundled up in the end it’s the same thing: You have an unnaturally filthy environment, you have a cleaning tool, clean. Occasionally you have extra tools to let you climb up things or clean certain kinds of dirt faster to help clean dirt.

And that’s it, that’s the game.

Of course what that doesn’t explain is the simple gameplay loop, the little “ding” and the like is what kind of keeps you hooked. You can just stick some videos on in the background, or films or whatever and just mindlessly clean. You can even quit part way through and come back later, yay!

Course this does have two downsides, 1: It can be kinda hell on your wrist if you’re using a mouse, 2: If this gameplay loop doesn’t engage you in the base game don’t grab any of the paid DLC. What I have that’s paid IIRC came with the bundle I got it with. I don’t think I’ll be rushing back to it but it was a good time working through it all.

I’ve not much to say on Peglin, it’s a fun little roguelite using a similar gameplay loop to Slay the Spire. I accidentally completed a run not realising I’d got to the end. I’d have played more honestly but I really wanted to get on to other games as I knew it would probably eat my time like Vampire Survivors and Balatro still do, but I had fun and that’s the main thing. I do plan to revisit it later and play out some of the unlockables

I’ll be openly honest, my expectations before release was reserved but potentially excited. I’ll openly admit it, I like Shadow, especially between 2001 and 2007 where he actually had a character and development, even if technically it was meant to end at 2001 as a one off appearance. His appearances after 06 often ended up with his character becoming flanderized as “Only grumpy, basically exists to butt heads with Sonic”. Are these traits Shadow doesn’t or shouldn’t have? No. Are they his only traits? Also no. He’d get trace elements of his other personality traits here and there but otherwise, bleh.

So a game that was actually going to be both based on the Frontiers engine and potentially treat Shadow like a character again? Yeah I was ready for that. And then they released the Dark Beginnings prologue animation and oops I was fully on board.

ANYWAY I am meant to be talking about a game not me complaining about my second favourite Sonic character losing all character development for a while (my first favourite is Tails, who also lost a lot of his character progress for a while… sigh).

Game’s good! I don’t like that they kind of shoehorned for half the game to be 2D like Sonic Generations but ho-hum. The inclusion of Sonic Forces and Frontiers was weird but I also think it would’ve been weird for them not to include them, though unlike some I do like the in lore reason which I won’t go in to because it’s more spoilers than I’d like to discuss here.

I do find it odd that Shadow’s titular game didn’t properly get representation, I can argue the first level “Space Colony ARK” is the level and I can even recognise elements from ShTH’s ARK levels in there, but ShadGens AND ShTH in the end for that level is pulling heavily from Sonic Adventure 2, which arguably does have a definitive level in ShadGens.

This is kind of a carry over problem from Shadow the Hedgehog (2005 game), Westopolis (and subiquently all city stages) pull heavily from SA2’s city stages. ShTH’s ARK stages can’t do anything but pull from SA2 for design. ShTH’s Eggman levels either pull from Sonic Heroes stages Casino Park, Cryptic Castle or Rail Canyon. GUN stages come in two varieties, SA2 GUN levels but slightly prettier or SA2 GUN levels but if you shoved Green Forest in to it (this includes Death Ruins).

That leaves ShTH stages over to Black Arms themed levels which was unlikely given the theming of Everything Else is kind of Black Arms-y. Ruins stages which kind of pull a little from Lost World/Echidna ruins from SA1, and… brown. Sky Troops was an improvement as it was in THE SKY but it was also technically Air Fleet from Sonic Heroes except you don’t get on Eggman’s ships, you just hop ruin to ruin and potentially shoot his ships down instead. Then finally Digital levels which are neat but thematically don’t really work with the rest of ShadGens IMO, but are potentially genuinely the most unique levels ShTH has to offer.

But like in Sonic Generations where the more iconic stages were picked (I love Final Egg but why would you make it a stage over Speed Highway or Emerald Coast for example?) you have to pick the thematic ones from ShTH… so the ARK.

Okay I need to stop I’m getting in the weeds again.

The Doom Powers were a neat thing to add but I also felt they were under utilised… however I also haven’t played half the game, yes I beat it and yes this is spoilers I guess but there’s more to ShadGens after you beat the final boss.

HOWEVER regardless of if I felt the abilities are under-utilised or not, Shadow doesn’t just play like Sonic as he did in SA2. They tweaked the move-set enough to give his own gameplay it’s own identity and it feels extremely good????

Like SEGA, I know you’re not gonna capture lightning in a bottle a third time but seriously consider using this engine for Sonic and, dare I say it, Shadow. Give Shadow another game. Between Frontiers, Frontiers: Final Horizon and Shadow Generations you’ve clearly got a solid engine here. Explore it’s potential more with this new 3D style of gameplay for Sonic, don’t reign it back now.

Speaking of reigning it back in though… including the Sonic Generations port as well, not included for my EoY rating as it’s a port of a game I beat in 2011, but it was a game I beat this year too so… I think they made SonGens worse??? Like between going back between Hedgehog 1 and Hedgehog 2 (Frontiers) you can feel it, but also the drop dash addition made the controls more finicky and I think just overall it doesn’t play as well as I remember it doing so.

Which is extremely weird because I originally got Sonic Generations to near 100% on keyboard only, finally borrowing a controller because drifting was one too many keys pressed at once for my keyboard at the time.

I recall at the time some people murmuring about it but I was like “No I think this feels how I remember it” but going back and finishing off the game a couple days ago I started feeling more and more “no… it does feel off”. Like yes, I’m out of practice but it felt a lot more unresponsive to inputs, especially modern Sonic.

It’s a pity, I’m sure people who never played the original won’t notice, but, IDK. Given SxSGens pulled down the original listing of Sonic Generations (booooo hiss booo) it’s a bit shitty. Well, maybe that’s just me.

Honestly the majority of the gameplay is unchanged so I’ll link back to the original post about it, but Humble does offer it’s own gameplay loop as well, in the early game. Instead of a lot of the base materials being readily available you need to refine it. So an extra step which… is neat to a point. At a certain point you kind of just, get bogged down and it loses it’s early lustre.

Another disappointing thing is that there’s some story and then it just… stops. And you’re left to it, there’s just a cold stop to the story after a certain point and robots/terminals are just repeating what you’ve seen before. Well. The DLC’s not bad but I’d def say don’t rush to pick it up.

At least this guy seemed to be enjoying it.

I could be like “Oh boy more Vampire Survivors” but I think that’s doing it a disservice when the Ode to Castlevania has characters with new mechanics, there’s new items, the stage is massive and so on.

Oh, and there’s 80 total characters and a heap of music to come with it.

Now it’s still Vampire Survivors at it’s core so… you know the basics at least. And it makes my brain go brrr

This is a normal screenshot I assure you.

A part of me thought I had “beat” NMS a while ago but my Backloggery entry both had it under “Unfinished” but I was unsure enough, and the Normandy expedition was running, that I felt like doing it again.

It really us amazing how much Hello Games have done with this game, even compared to when I picked it up which was after they “fixed” it. It’s still quirkily No Man’s Sky but that’s part of the charm in the end.

Now I hear you asking “DO, how do you beat No Man’s Sky?” and the answer is simple: There’s three main missions, progress them far enough until all three go infinite similar to how say, completing a storyline in a Bethesda game ends up with “hey can you keep doing shit for us?”

A peek behind the curtain of me writing this post would be that I wrote this last, but the order of the games here are them chronologically as I beat them since July however I was kind of dreading writing about Crash 4. Hoo, here goes.

At the base of it, I do think the game is a sort of fan love story of the original trilogy and Crash Team Racing, while also retconning the other games (There’s even a joke about it, Coco gets asked by a side character how many times the bandicoots and Cortex fought and Coco replies “Three” which garners the response “Really? Feels like it should have been more”). Sorry Japan, you now have two Crash 4s.

So most of the key evil “N”s are dragged in to the fray, N. Cortex obviously as well as N. Brio, N. Gin, N. Tropy, N. Tropy (I refuse to elaborate) and even N. Oxide of all characters. I think from reading up even N. Trance and Nina Cortex make cameo appearances. There’s other cameos here and there from other characters too, but the focus is the Bandicoots, masks and “N”s.

It’s fun it’s cute but the way they went about it kind of meant it felt a little disjointed as a result. It had the structure of Crash 1 effectively but wanting to be Crash 3. But hey it let me play as Dingodile and his delightful run cycle.

The real problem with Crash 4 though is it felt like they took comments about Crash 2 and 3 being hard to complete and seemingly wanting to make it significantly harder to complete. Level difficulty ramps up quickly, there’s an insane number of crates in some levels that aren’t Dingodile’s levels, and the last level can frankly eat my ass and I only forced my way through it knowing because I knew it was the final level.

I knew by then I wasn’t gonna 10X% complete Crash 4, but the idea of doing that final level deathless, when I want to say 100 of those deaths come from the literal last section of the stage. Fuck iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit all to hell.

ANYWAY in addition to this, I’m also including the Crash Bandicoot: N.Sane Trilogy here as I beat them before Crash 4, but as I beat ’em way back on the Switch. I don’t know if the Switch ver was dropping inputs or I’m just Hashtag Better at games since 2018 but I played so much better at Crash 2 and 3 to the point I got them to 102% and 108% respectively. Crash 2 and 3 are classics for a reason, Crash 1 not so much.

I actually don’t have much to say on Slime Rancher, I played it intending to be like “the last game” for me of 2024 but I quickly got bored of the loop and just gunned to the end of the game. This isn’t because I thought the game is bad no, it’s a cute game, but just didn’t hook me like it did for others.

It plays well and I can see how it hooked others but it just means it’s not specifically a game for me! It’s not a bad thing to come out a game feeling like that if it’s not from a frustrating or annoyed viewpoint!

“The campus is haunted, again”

As I beat the base game in 2023 I never made a post about it here so there’s not much I can say here but if you enjoyed Theme Hospital, and wanted to play a modern version of that then go play Two Point Hospital as it’s not just the spiritual successor but also had staff who made the original Theme Hospital work on it. Then if you’re bored of TPH or if you don’t want to play a hospital sim you can play Two Point Campus as a College/University simulator (I’d argue it’s probably more a UK University simulator than a US college simulator but that’s just me).

I actually enjoyed TPC more than TPH! But I think it’s mostly because TPC had QoL changes that I wished TPH had, and I wonder if I’ll feel the same when Two Point Museum comes out next year! Anyway onward to what I’m actually talking about

We’re talking about the DLCs Space Academy, School Spirits and Medical School. Of the three I felt Medical School was the strongest, followed by Space Academy and School Spirits. This isn’t to say School Spirits was bad it’s just that the other two are better.

All three theme themselves accordingly too, Space Academy partly riffs off Star Trek for the most part, School Spirits is set on a delipidated spooky estate, and Medical School pulls from Two Point Hospital and successfully blends the two.

Space Academy had a lot of fun poking at Sci-fi (though again mostly Star Trek) tropes but also fandoms too (you can set up a Sci-fi con in the Student Union for example). Though I felt there wasn’t as much cohesion between all three campuses, each one wanted to be it’s own thing but in the theme, which is fine! But it did mean that it didn’t feel a previous map moved over to the next unlike the DLC for TPH which was a little more cohesive internally.

School Spirits is a single map and focused only on that map and well, ghosts! Which does in part bring over the ghost mechanics from TPH but with a few extra twists. It’s main difference though was that you couldn’t just outright buy (or complete certain objectives like in other maps) your new plots, you needed to battle an “evil spirit” for it which depended on your Ghost Detection students. Which is neat but it did get a little tedious.

Medical School was back to three maps but also focused on effectively being “Two Point Hospital, lite version”. You’re partly setting up a hospital now as well as an educational campus. While the medical students “learn on the job” you’ll probably still be getting your money from other courses so you’re blending your campus with typical educational areas and hospital areas, which comes in with a little bit of patient management… it also lets them reuse the ghost capture mechanic they used in both TPH and School Spirits. Of the three Medical School is the one I want to complete as I have a better idea how to manage the first map now after going through all three.