Zoe E. Whitten

I should probably start this post off with some pleading apology after saying I would do a game review soon and then vanishing for weeks. But what happened was, I started playing older games, and I kept bouncing from one to the next as soon as I finished a run in each. Nothing worth a review, but I had a good time, and it helped me to avoid doom scrolling. I’m calling that a win.

Anywho, when it comes to technology, we live in strange times. My phone, despite being two years old now, has more RAM and storage space than my first PC, as well as more video RAM, better sound quality, and a higher screen resolution. And yet, when it comes to mobile games and apps, we live in a time of virtual garbage.

This is why I initially had hope for subscription models that would make games better by ditching ads, “microtransactions,” (100 dollars for a bag of digital currency is not a micro anything) and loot boxes. But many games on these services are the same mobile shite with the exploitation removed, and that doesn’t change the fact that most simply aren’t fun to play. They still desperately peddle daily login gifts to try and keep people on the treadmill, but when it comes to the actual gameplay between all the lousy menus and worthless presents, there’s not enough incentive to keep going.

Which brings me to Word Trails, courtesy of Netflix’s subscription. It’s pretty much like a lot of other word puzzle games. The top half of the screen is similar to a crossword grid, and the lower half has a circle with letters to link and form words. Any words spelled that aren’t on the grid go into a bonus pot, which eventually fills up to award a pittance amount of gold. Continue reading

Folks, I apologize for all these delays with new updates. I finished playing the Brotato: Abyssal Terrors DLC for this review before I went to the hospital, but I am still on the mend and find myself returning to bed for long naps with just a few chores around the house. Did I need to ride my bike into town for supplies? Well then, it’s time for a two hour nap. Pulled some weeds in the yard? Three hour nap. This isn’t likely to improve soon, but I’ll do my best to get back on track with reviews.

So, before I talk about the Brotato DLC, I should mention that I had little interest in getting it until I noticed that the achievements progress bar in Epic Game Store’s library page wasn’t full even though I’d unlocked everything. This by itself annoys me. I can’t say if it’s a problem with Epic’s platform only, or if it was a choice of the game maker’s and is the same on Steam, but either way, I should not be penalized for not buying the DLC.

Adding into this is the percent of players who completed the achievements, but I’ll get into that later. (And this will be a recurring theme in my next review as well.) But setting that aside, I decided to get the DLC because some of the challenges sounded interesting enough that I wanted to try them. Continue reading

Gaming in 2024 became a bit more vexing for me this year. As I’m mentioned several times before, my PS4 died, and my PC is now so old that it can’t keep up with newer games. So stuff like Elden Ring, Enotria, Lies of P, Star Wars Jedi Survivor, and Marvel’s Midnight Suns all gave me a big nope when I tried booting them up.

Now don’t worry, I’m planning to get a new gaming PC in 2025. Whether I get a PS5 is still up in the air, and depends a lot on me getting some new books out. But that’s a me problem, not a y’all problem.

Despite the hardware setbacks, I was still able to find these gems, which I am quite happy to share with y’all. Continue reading

I am absolutely delighted to be contrasting this review to my last one for a number of reasons, because in most of the ways River City Girls failed, Neon Abyss manages to make playing it not only tolerable, but enjoyable. Granted, they are not similar games, with one being a fighting game and the other being a side scrolling rogue-lite. But what I mean is that Neon Abyss sets out to build a game that I’d want to keep revisiting over and over, and they passed that test with ease.

Neon Abyss opens with Hades asking the player to defeat the new titans, who have stolen some of Hades’ powers and taken over the human world through corporations. So the player picks a mercenary to enter the titular neon abyss to slog though a set of dungeon and boss fights, leading to a showdown with one of the titans.

Each defeated titan unlocks another target to hunt down, and defeating the regular bosses also unlocks alternate forms of the fight. For example, defeating Tok, the god of social media, unlocks Tik, and beating Sung, the god of Screens grants access to later fights with Sam. Continue reading

Time is a funny thing. The way you experience it can feel vastly different depending on whether you are enjoying what you do, or whether you were being tortured. For example, I played just a hair under fifty hours of Shakedown Hawaii and loved almost every minute of it. Then I played twenty-two hours of River City Girls, and it felt like it would never end.

Unlike Shakedown Hawaii, an homage to GTA games, River City Girls is an actual entry in a very long-running franchise, Japan’s Kunio series. The intellectual properties were bought by ARC systems, who then went on to make this and many more games. I can’t talk about the quality of the others, but I can say this was quite a painful experience, both physically and mentally. Beating the game somehow made all of my efforts even worse, like deciding to pick my nose after scratching my sweaty butthole.

Oh, and I need to warn you, there will be massive story spoilers this time, because I cannot explain my pain without exposing that god awful ending. So if you want to avoid spoilers, skip this review, okay? Continue reading