Welcome back to the Monthly Digest series entry for April in 2024.

Without further ado, lets get into it. :D

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Monthly Bounty

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The second month of adventure games is over, another bounty has been fulfilled. (even though it wasn´t me.)

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Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars - Director's Cut

PC/Windows - Steam
Finished
Time: 8h 48m
Rating: 3 out of 10

Well, normally this entry would be found under the "Girlfriend Games" section, due to my girlfriend playing the biggest chunks of the game, but it was a bounty so here it is:

First up, with the DLC you have two options to play the game. You can either play the Director´s Cut edition or the original story. We figured that we wanted to play the Director´s Cut for optimization, expanded story and surely upgraded visuals. Big Mistake...

My first and only contact point with the Broken Sword series was watching my little stepbrother play Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon back in the day. To be honest, it never really sparked my interest, with me being not a big fan of the point & click genre in general. On the other hand, my girlfriend LOVES point & click games. After seeing Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars - Director's Cut featured as a bounty, she couldn´t resist the temptation.

As stated above, we opted for the director´s cut option. Which adds surprisingly little to the actual story. Normally you play as George, a comedic american who visits paris for his holidays and got nearly killed by a bomb attack on a local cafe. From here you start investigating and meet a young journalist named Nico. Here is the biggest (and as far as we can tell, only) difference between the stories. In the original game Nico is like a sidekick who helps you finding your way through the game and offers a helping hand now and then, in the DC edition, you get to play her and experience a side story revealing stuff about her dad... which doesn´t add any value to the rest of the games story whatsoever, but hey, her part is decently interesting and the puzzles are fun enough.

Another addition of the DC is the implementation of Professor Layton-esque minigame-puzzles, which range from pretty fun to rage inducing. The upgraded visuals clash hard with the original oldschool parts of the game, look very out of place and ugly. Like, having a 2D environment and a group of characters are in the same scene, of which one character is randomly 3D ... yes we don´t know why either.

But, the big question is: Is the game fun?

Our answer would be: Mehh ~~

Nearly every next move our character takes is accompanied by a "Why the heck would we do that?" or "Yes, of course. That is the logical conclusion I would draw from that!" from at least one of us. It is most of the times totally nonsensical and I am really confused of what they try to archieve here. You have the very comical main character, but nearly everyone else is super serious, even though they added tons of weird humor. (My best explanation for the humor would be german old-school adventure games and a lot of dad humor fueled by beer) Sadly, the cinematics are broken and often end to early or aren´t even included, first we thought it is a typical "old-game-on-new-hardware" problem but seems like its happening to everyone. Overall the story is okay, it got us to laugh a lot and that is something at least.

Now the big question is: Does the series get better or can my girlfriend rest easy on skipping the rest. Write your opinion in the comment section. (And like and subscribe, push the button, ring the bell ... sry I couldn't resist xD)

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Challenges

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At the moment, I challenge myself to play all games ever released by Namco or Bandai or Namco Bandai or Bandai Namco for the Xbox platforms.
Here the Games List.

Sitting at 5 finished out of 132.

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The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes

PC/Windows - Steam
Finished
Time: 6h 20m
Rating: 8 out of 10

Yes, it is this time again. House of Ashes marks the third entry in the Dark Picture series. It manages to keep the tradition of steady improving going and knows how to deliver a great experience.

As you probably know we played all the previous games too and I have to say, this iteration could be the best one for online coop play. They changed the structure of how the story unfolds, split up of the characters and how situations play out in such a way that it supports online coop more than ever.

Also, like tradition, they fixed the biggest problem the last game had and introduced a complete new one. For everyone unfamiliar with the game series: The game offers three options: Singleplayer, couch coop and online coop. In couch and online play you assign characters to different players. Normally you decide what they do, walk them around and do QTEs. Last time our greatest issue was, that in high intensity scenes, the game would ignore the character assignments to their respective players. Meaning that in such a scene I got to do QTEs for characters which were assigned to my girlfriend, which felt extremely stupid. Luckily they decided to fix this by giving you a prompt to give your controller to another player, I guess they thought initially that doing it this way would kill the tension of the scene, but it works totally fine and is a good fix, at least to us. The new issue is less gameplay related, more on the immersion killing side. Due to the new way the story is structured, at certain converging points you get like a little "wrap up" cinematic. Sometimes this little wrap ups reset some of the things which have already happened and kinda reinterpret them in weird ways. An example: Some characters have a stand off and point guns at each other. Due to some stuff that happened earlier you decide to deescalate the situation by dropping your weapon to the ground. This prompts one of the other characters to vouch for you and everything cools down. Suddenly, you get a new cinematic in which you are back to the stand off. After screaming a little at each other your character starts to lower their weapon again, then out of nowhere another character, not previously in the scene, appears and starts shooting, which prompts the other characters to shoot back and get into cover. While the confusion is happening my character decides to grab his gun and run off. -> The wrap up basically "changes" what the outcome was and decides to do stuff that wasn´t previously part of the scene. It is confusing and feels completely out of field. I understand that they needed a scene for the players in online coop who haven´t been part of the scene and arrive late, but that is definitely not the way. Not all wrap ups have this issue, but it created some WTF-moments.

Besides that the graphics look great, the story is, of course, highly subjective, but still got the "Ohh~ That is whats going on!" feeling going which is great.

Definitely, like the other games in the series, a big recommendation from me.

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Dark Souls: Remastered

PC/Windows - Steam
Ongoing
Time at writing: 20h 4m
(temporary) Rating: 8 out of 10

Like I mentioned in the last digest, currently I am getting coached through Dark Souls: Remastered together with two of my buddies. I also played the original Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition on PC with the same friends, but due to various reasons we only got to around 80% of the way towards the endboss, so technically I never beat the game. In the beginning I really didn´t like the game at all. Back then I was in a really stressful part of my life and couldn´t stand the "unfair" nature of what was shown to me inside the game. Since then a lot has changed and I gained a different perspective on videogames in general and what they mean for me. Still, placing archers with umbrella shaped arrows, which have a knockback to topple an elephant, on top of a roof, all the while you need to sprint across the narrowest bridge in the history of videogames is still a so called "dick move".

Dark Souls should be known to the majority of players world wide, so I won´t get into the details about the game in general or the mechanics and will try to highlight the differences in the Remastered edition. (Even though there is a lot to talk about. If you would like to read about pure mechanics, history and artstyle as separate content as well, just drop a comment about under the article so that I know that there is interest about this topics.)

The most prominent difference is the updated graphics, they are mostly updated with higher resolution textures and new shiny shaders which looks really pretty. You shouldn´t get to close to the geometry though, they are updated but still run on the same old core engine from 2011, there is a only so much you can achieve with such an old base.

Otherwise the game is basically the same as the original, even down to all the old bugs, glitches and yank. Overall this is great, but they could have fixed some of the gameplay hindering bugs like the slip-n-slide crystal in the cave on your way to Seath or the long input buffering. (You can´t even begin to imagine how often I died because of that) To our surprise they however added some unexpected quality of life features: You can now change your covenant while sitting near a bonfire, they also added the item for 4 player coop to the inventory of the undead burg merchant and updated the whole online experience, which is now on par with the newer Souls titles.

Overall I would say that the Remastered edition is actually decent, for new players who missed out and want a genuine Dark Souls experience, as well as seasoned veterans who get the "itch" to play the original with working online features this is definitely a recommendation for now.

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Girlfriend Games

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Well, we already talked about Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars - Director's Cut already. Currently she is playing Fallout 4: Game of the Year Edition and loving it. (Even though the repetitiveness is slowly kicking in)

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Misc Games

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Balatro

PC/Windows - Steam
Unfinished
Time at writing: 11h 35m
(temporarily) Rating: 8 out of 10

What happens when you mix Poker, rogue-like element and big number games together?

Balatro happens!

In Balatro your goal is to beat the last Ante (Endboss) with one of the different starting decks. On the way towards your goal you need to break the game rules/systems as hard as you humanly can to even have a chance of beating the bosses. Right now, I have played for 11 hours and still feel like I have only scratched the surface. What I can say, however, that this game is a certified banger and there is nothing like it on the current market. So it will definitely return at some point in the future.

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Community Content

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If I have to choose between the two entries from AllTheTrophies, my pick would be:

AllTheTrophies
The GameCube Gauntlet #020 - Shrek 2
-The game is super interesting for a license game and it is an interesting read, as always. :)

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And as always, keep completionating. :D