Week of 01 Jun 2025
“It’s your choice, princess!”
Achievements Earned In:
- NeverDead
- Dordogne
- Blacksmith Forger
- Keplerth
This was the week to get as much of NeverDead completed as possible. I was almost through my first playthrough of the campaign, so it didn’t take long to reach the final boss encounter and struggle-bus my way through that mess. In fact, that’s all this entire game is: struggling. I don’t understand how this was focus tested (hopefully) and was seen as fun or successful enough to release like this. It’s just obnoxious and frustrating. This did not raise my hopes for the “Hardcore” playthrough I started on Tuesday, and good god what a pain. So many times I’d get my body back together after a demon breathed on me, and almost immediately explode all over the room again. I was shocked that even though this kept happening, early on I pretty much never got eaten by a Grandbaby. And even when they did start to get at me, I rarely failed the QTE and died! Honestly, this isn’t “hard”: use the sword often to make short work of enemies (Spoons especially) and use the shotgun and assault rifle to make short work of bosses. Definitely get aim snap and slow-mo skills early on to help. That final boss was by far the most annoying, but I didn’t actually fail at all; it just took ages because I spent most of the time getting back to my body, only for a ground smash or exploding Puppy to knock everything apart again. Perseverance won the day, though, and I actually beat that stupid playthrough. With that out of the way, I mopped up the rest of the single-player achievements, like grinding XP for all the abilities (freaking 6 million for all but one ability, then ten million for that final one alone) and destroying $1 mil of property.
Then it was on to the multiplayer, which are a series of challenges that come in five variations. Three of them (Onslaught, Arena Onslaught, Search and Rescue) are co-op, and the final two (Egg Hunt and Fragile Alliance) are competitive, and you have to “win” every challenge on both Normal and Hardcore difficulties. The competitive ones can be “cheated” easily enough by working together to boost one person to the win, and trading off. The Onslaught modes don’t really pose a whole lot of challenge, though you have to hope the enemies don’t run around the level away from you and waste time. By far the most difficult is Search and Rescue, where you have to escort 5-8 very squishy civilians to safety in a set amount of time. The two other achievement hunters I’m doing this with made the one level we managed to finish so much more difficult than it had to be. Seriously, I had the pattern down early on, but they refused to follow my instructions and kept getting us killed. Took hours just to clear it, and luckily that is by far the hardest of the three levels in this mode. Overall we’ve gotten through about half of the content, so hopefully we can get through the rest this next week.
Achievements unlocked: 41 (+30) | Completion: 98%
Maybe if I hide my head here, I can give Arcadia a really good scare when she goes to bed.
It was back to the “leaving Game Pass” list, and one I wanted to for sure get was Dordogne, which almost looks like a Ghibli Studios movie come to life. You play as Mimi, going back to her recently-deceased grandmother’s home in the Dordogne region of France to try and piece to together a summer missing from her memory. You flip back and forth between “modern” day and her childhood, exploring the area around the home and spending time with her free-spirited though somewhat overbearing grandmother. The art style is gorgeous, truly, and is a mixture of a watercolor picture and an anime. The story itself is also beautiful and sweet, and the ending brought tears to my eyes. Completion-wise, it’s very easy and straight-forward, so follow a guide for the collectibles and enjoy the ride.
Achievements unlocked: 31 (+31) | Completed
Every image is a work of art.
It was time to hit the road with some friends, so I decided to burn through one of the “baby games” I have on backup, so we could hit the road ASAP. I picked Blacksmith Forger, a “Diner Dash”-type, but takes around 5 minutes to get all the achievements. Every time you sell an item you get an achievement, and at the tenth you’re all done. I’m hoping this doesn’t get a swarm of easy title updates like a lot of this type of game gets.
Achievements unlocked: 10 (+10) | Completed
This is the game. You saw it all.
There were a few other options to play of the games leaving Game Pass, and I landed on the dark horse of the bunch: Keplerth, a Windows-only title (due to the absence of long-promised controller support) that has little information about it on TrueAchievements. Luckily, I’d scoped this out a while ago, and found a nice Steam guide to help so I figured I’d take the risky dive into this one. I have played very little so far since I was on vacation, but I think it’s a top-down survival action game. Guess tune in next week!
Achievements unlocked: 1 (+1) | Completion: 2%
Rarest Achievement:
Big Spender in NeverDead [6.01]
Most Common Achievements:
The First Memory in Dordogne [1.00]
SELL 1 ITEM in Blacksmith Forger [1.00]
SELL 2 ITEM in Blacksmith Forger [1.00]
SELL 3 ITEM in Blacksmith Forger [1.00]
SELL 4 ITEM in Blacksmith Forger [1.00]
SELL 5 ITEM in Blacksmith Forger [1.00]
SELL 6 ITEM in Blacksmith Forger [1.00]
SELL 7 ITEM in Blacksmith Forger [1.00]
SELL 8 ITEM in Blacksmith Forger [1.00]
SELL 9 ITEM in Blacksmith Forger [1.00]
SELL 10 ITEM in Blacksmith Forger [1.00]
