“I'm not putting my lips on that.”
Achievements Earned In:
- Full Throttle Remastered
- Rise of the Tomb Raider
- Post Trauma
- Loan Shark
- Hollowbody
To start the week, it was time to hit the list of games leaving the Xbox Game Pass library! The trilogy of LucasArts remasters are included, and since I’d already completed Day of the Tentacle Remastered back in 2020, I started with Full Throttle Remastered. I actually know very little about this one compared to the others, so I was legit interested to dive in and… totally organically follow a full step-by-step walkthrough. It was the usual humor you get from these games, with a mixture of leisurely point-and-click adventuring and occasional timed events. The achievements are easy, and the game is silly. The babyest of games!
Achievements unlocked: 40 (+40) | Completed
The true breaking of the Bro Code.
Even though Full Throttle Remastered took me longer than it should have, when I finished up I still had plenty of time on Tuesday, so I jumped back into Rise of the Tomb Raider. And I spent all night working on a single stage: The Copper Mill. Could I have easily gotten a bronze in it and moved to a shorter or easier level for the tenth gold I needed? Sure, but I DIDN’T WANT TO. Because I could easily see how to get the score I needed, I quickly got too stubborn for my own good and just tried and tried until three hours later I got it. It’s easy enough to get a good route down, but surviving the first combat encounter with the cards I picked with my combo intact was the hardest part. The enemies on Survivor difficulty are crazy good at nailing you with a bullet the second you’re not behind cover. I used the game’s ability to copy a friend’s loadout to get some good cards I didn’t have (thanks Neomaster for the infinite poison arrows!) and that made it much more manageable. With that I can just start smoking through the rest and get bronze! …At least until I get to the Wicked Vale Score Attacks.
Achievements unlocked: 50 (+1) | Completion: 59%
With all that mopped up, I remembered it’s spooky season! I wanna do some horror games, so after a little research into the games I had available I started with Post Trauma on Tuesday. This is very much a game inspired by Silent Hill 2 (which ended up being a running theme for the end of this week…) where you play as an older train conductor named Roman who wakes up in a twisted dimension and has to deal with trauma and grief and stuff. Oh, and lots of monsters! I’d say this game is pretty easy overall, and the completion is about the same. There are collectibles, but only a couple spread out over the four areas you’ll be adventuring through. There isn’t a whole lot of combat, but using a melee weapon works just fine most of the time. The minute things get tense, whip out that gun and end it quick. There’re also two endings, but you can reload the final section and make the alternative choice, face the end boss again, and get the other ending. The best part of the whole experience was Roman’s voice actor, Togo Igawa, who just had a really… out of place diction. Everyone else is reading their lines like they’re in a different game! But, overall, I don’t have a clue what was going on.
Achievements unlocked: 15 (+15) | Completed
Oh no, did I kill your wife or something? Mutilate you? Eat your parfait?
Keeping with the spooks, I jumped into Loan Shark on Wednesday. I really wanted to get to this one because it’s… weird. You are a fisherman that is in debt to the mob, and your big plan is to fish away the debt. The problem is you have a single night to accomplish this! Seems impossible, right? Well, until you fish up a talking fish that promises to help. For a price. The gameplay is a lot of fishing, obviously, but soon after Cagliuso comes into your life the night gets weirder and weirder. It’s a very easy completion, though, and not very long. Even with the necessary couple playthroughs for achievements. Glad I got to this strange little game!
Achievements unlocked: 16 (+16) | Completed
Wait. Wait. Wait. …Yeah, I don’t think so.
And finally, I ended the week with Hollowbody, which… is another game with a tad bit of inspiration from Silent Hill 2. But this is one far more blatant. Even the diseased people you come across make radio-static noises! I’m not sure if you’re facing grief or anything this time, as the story makes even less sense than Post Trauma. But the production values are so good! It really does feel like an updated version of an early PlayStation survival horror game. The entire game is pretty linear, too. I’d give this a lot more praise if the combat wasn’t almost tragically bad. It ticked me off so much trying to use the melee weapons! It didn’t take long until I realized I could just breeze past every enemy, so I stopped fighting unless I needed to clear some space for puzzles or loot. But like a lot of these games, there is almost nothing online in the way of guides to help. In fact, not a single achievement on TrueAchievements has a solution! I’ll be remedying that, but it made it so I had to backtrack for collectibles and such after my first playthrough. Even worse, there was a whole set of collectibles that are setup in a little mini-quest chain that I spent too much time running around looking for, but apparently was patched to only appear in the harder difficulty! So, I got to get those during my second playthrough, which also included a secret ending that required I don’t heal more than three times. I actually managed it only healing once! So the game isn’t that hard, and took me 1.5 hours once I knew what I was doing. If they updated the game and tightened up the combat, this would be a legit good game.
Achievements unlocked: 26 (+26) | Completed
Oh no, was that your monster-tentacle-dog I shot?!
Rarest Achievement:
Well Begun Is Half Done in Rise of the Tomb Raider [4.76]
Most Common Achievement:
Again in Post Trauma [1.00]
