No bosses you say?  Thank fuck.  I’m straight in after Luigi is done.

Edit;  at moot and his yooka laylee

73. Manual Samuel - Switch

Managed to miss this by a day on gamepass as it dropped off before I got my act together.  Handily it popped up for £2.99 in a recent EShop sale.  It's quite a unique experience, vaguely reminiscent of Octodad in the way limbs are assigned to buttons, but resolutely its own thing.  It plays out like a humour-heavy point 'n click with deliberately cumbersome controls.  You have to keep Samuel alive for 24hrs, which requires the player to take charge of such mundanities as breathing (X & A) and blinking ( B ) while tackling any tasks at hand (drinking coffee, for example - L & R + a timed stab of X and DAMMIT).  It all starts magnificently, but gradually peters out into a bit of a whiffer unfortunately.  When it sticks to what it does best, which is basic puzzles while plate spinning objectives with unwieldy controls, it's absolutely fine and the writing even elicits a titter or two.  Eventually the devs run out of ideas, which is a shame as surely it wouldn't have taken much magic marker ink to come up with something better for the whiteboard than 'let's turn it into a dodgy treacle-slow run 'n gun then add a terrible beat 'em up section at the very end'.  
A harsh [5] then.  It's a game worth experiencing but it does shit the bed quite spectacularly in the final third. 

My wife deleted Bejewelled eventually too.  This is going back a few years (might've been on Facebook actually), but it had become an unhealthy obsession.

It's pretty clever, I think, in terms of how it uses perspective (or lack of) and messes with cliches. Some decent slapstick as well.

35. Ape Out [8]
5-6 Nov
I love the style of this, and the structure that unfolds like a classic, high concept arcade game, building on a tight rule set with slight variations throughout. The soundtrack is the highlight, with its jazz drums and cymbals beating out the rhythm of your actions. It's perfect for a style of play that often feels like improv, with its meandering progress routes and moments of panic, that also match the sense of controlling a gorilla run amok. The classic jazz album visual design rounds it off perfectly. The game itself manages to segue between different modes from moment to moment with a very basic control system. Bursts of stealth, twin-stick shooting and maze running blend together. and each enemy type demands its own approach. The only issues really are due to unevenness, in quality of level design and difficulty, with some sections flying by with no new challenges and a few bits proving irritatingly tough (level 3.6, that's you). Otherwise it does exactly what it sets out to do. And the ending is great too.

If you like the more challenging platform stuff and you haven't done it all, you should go on and get the golden key pieces and do the final challenge behind the golden door.

It's hard to tell from this how much of a headfuck it is:

Yeah, that's the thing, You're not doing any dimension shifting yourself but you've got to stay within the darker bands while making the jumps. The way they overlap, and the need to change direction at certain points messes with your head.

The fact that the whole thing seems to offer a drop-in multiplayer mode for up for four players is pretty impressive too.  Haven't tried it out yet, so I'm not sure quite how it works with the platforming sections.

Moot_Geeza wrote:

The fact that the whole thing seems to offer a drop-in multiplayer mode for up for four players is pretty impressive too.  Haven't tried it out yet, so I'm not sure quite how it works with the platforming sections.

Yeah, I find that odd. I'm guessing one player would end up doing them while others waited. I can't see the advantage in multiple players trying to do the same bit at the same time.

Yeah, that was one I always thought I'd get at some point, and then never did.

JonB wrote:

Moot_Geeza wrote:

The fact that the whole thing seems to offer a drop-in multiplayer mode for up for four players is pretty impressive too.  Haven't tried it out yet, so I'm not sure quite how it works with the platforming sections.

Yeah, I find that odd. I'm guessing one player would end up doing them while others waited. I can't see the advantage in multiple players trying to do the same bit at the same time.

It falls apart a bit. It just follows player 1 and turns the trailing player into some floating dots that can respawn at P1’s location next time they’re stationary. If P2 is ahead the screen won’t catch up so you’re playing blind. There’s whole sections where you latch on to those mid-air catapult things that will launch you around a few screen lengths at a time. They’re not really playable properly in MP. It’s still way better having it than not, I’ve played through both in MP and it’s good fun. But there are moments where you have to sit it out.

It’s not quite that bad. It’s just now and then. There’s some good bits like the piñata bits where you have to take out enemies against the clock where you coordinate a bit. You do this side, I’ll do those guys etc.

Paul the sparky wrote:

Outland is good. Not as punishing as stuff like Ikaruga obviously, I managed it easily enough.

Installing now.

36. Sparklite [6]
7-10 Nov
This started off very promising and it certainly looks and sounds the part. 16-bit visuals and sounds that reminded me of Secret of Mana as much as anything (although the music isn't that good). The combat and upgrading systems are also solid and there are some decent boss fights. But in the end it's all just a little bland. Exploring isn't that much fun when what you discover is rarely exciting. It works by procedurally shifting around the contents of the levels each time you return to the hub (although it's really not a Roguelike, as you're always progressing and keep stuff when you die), and in each area there's a new piece of equipment to find as well as other caves and grottoes with useful power ups. But once you've found the main stuff it gets repetitive traipsing around looking for minor treasures. It doesn't help that the level design never really requires you to use your Zelda-like inventory to solve puzzles either. Each item is really just a new kind of key to access more of the area. I still finished it and couldn't really dislike it, but it just didn't do enough.

77. Forza Horizon 4 - Xbox One

Drawing attention to the fine print in the OP regarding completion here as there doesn't seem to be a credit roll to add a full stop to the campaign (other than mopping up every single icon on the map and declaring yourself done, and no sir I am not doing that).  So yeah, after 11.5hrs on the tarmac, mud, snow, sand & gravel I consider myself a seasoned racer and we're parting ways.  I've completed something like 60 of 70 exhibition races come rain or shine, raced planes, trains, hovercraft & automobiles, filmed stunt set-pieces, acted as a taxi driver and racked up the air miles doing Big Jumps.  I've seen most of what the solo experience has to offer and I'm happy to leave it there as I've got a feeling more would be less for me.   

The good bits.  Firstly, the visuals are astonishing.  Every single time I booted the game up there was a moment where I caught myself gawping at the gorgeous car/scenery porn.  How the hell does it look this good?  Sloshing through puddles never got old, nor did fucking around with the view as I launched my motor of choice from the top of a hill.  Twinned with the correct tunes on Spotify it's pretty much impossible not to have a cracking time most of the time; the audiovisual wallop is too strong to resist.  The giant playing field is brilliant, but the sp mode is clearly just the icing/cherry on top of a cake designed to be gobbled up by as many players as possible.     

The bad bits.  I never quite clicked with the handling.  I rarely play real world racers (4hrs of Driveclub and 2hrs of FH3 is about it for me this gen, unless Trackmania Turbo counts), so the halfway house between sim and arcade was a wee bit off for my tastes.  I spent a lot of time slowly skidding into barriers as the car refused to turn.  Clearly this was me being a spanner-handed numpty bonce, but finding cars that suited my style of play tended to leave me pootling around in the solid & reliable types, rather than anything that earned its go-faster stripes.  Also, as alluded to earlier, the campaign mode is merely an undercard for the meat & potatoes of the online experience - which I choose not to experience.  The checkpoints thing also grated at times, but it's a small price to pay for the way it's all set out.  These aren't racetracks after all.  I also found it a bit dull making my way to the destination each time and would've preferred a more consistent fast travel option.  You do have to pay credits for the privilege, after all.

The good outweights the bad though, despite the relative length of the paragraphs above.  In a nutshell it's a glorious package that's not quite my sort of game, with a single player mode that eventually veers towards samey.  Despite valiant efforts to mix things up it's still mostly a checkpoint racer, and after a while that tends to become rote if you tackle it alone.  So a harsh [7] for the game as I played it, but I'd wager it's a straight [9] for anyone interested in online gaming.  I haven't played a 'realistic' racing game properly since Forza Motorsport 2, so it was clearly doing plenty of things right.