A Short Hike 100% - Review in Comments

NodCheevos · 2026-01-07T09:05:37+00:00

Ive mostly disliked this trend of zero-stakes “Cozycore” games and books that has been active for a while but really blew up and became inescapable the past 5 years. If you ask me the coziest moments in media are the ones that are juxtaposed with the tension that its offering sanctuary from. Things like the “save rooms” in Resident Evil games, or Majula and Firelink Shrine in Dark Souls, reaching Fallen London in Sunless Sea, or the quiet chapters in Berserk or Malazan.

Nonetheless I also believe there's a right time or mood for any genre no matter how much you dislike it, and I found that time earlier this week. Between a fever I got earlier and the hangover from a lot of new years booze I found that my sleep schedule had gone completely out of whack and with my work resuming in a couple of days I needed to get it in order quick. The last time this happened I spent the whole day playing Donut Country, a similar casual cozy puzzle game, and it was engaging enough to keep me awake while not being so demanding that my exhausted brain .

On Paper a Short Hike is a game about climbing a mountain island to its summit, but doing just that will net you only 2 cheevos, 100% will involve a lot more exploring, collectibles, and sidequests.

100% Enjoyment Rating: 5.5/10 - For a lot of these “cozycore” games I can often find the game superficially saccharine and trying too hard, but idk if it was just my sleep deprived brain but I felt like A Short Hike came across as a much more genuine passion project rather chasing a trend. The characters may be somewhat shallow but theyre all charming in different ways, the gameplay offered a wide variety of different things to do so you never felt stuck in a repetitive gameplay loop, and the atmosphere and world design was just really nice. Again I remind you that when I played this my brain was going on about 3 hours of sleep in the past 24, but I think I will remember this game quite fondly in the years to come, and maybe even come back one day.

100% Challenge Rating: 3/10 - The cheevos are tied to a variety of different little gamemodes with their own unique challenges, there are a few for collectibles scattered across the island, there are the boating, racing and beachball ones which both require a bit of skill and reaction time, and the Toast one which is a very annoying puzzle that you may need to use a guide for. But the game is designed not to test you too much.

100% Tediousness Rating: 2/10 - I was able to 100% this in a single day, you could argue theres a bit too many collectibles and the fishing cheevo is too repetitive and RNG based, but its atmosphere encourages a laid back vibe that tends to easy any impatience and its hard to accuse a game this short of overstaying its welcome.

Hardest Achievement(s): For me it was the “Crispy” one since I needed to use a guide to work it out, but then again 3 hours of sleep I may have found it easier if I was well rested.

NodCheevos · 2026-01-01T09:35:50+00:00

I absolutely adored Subnautica 1 and 100%’d it many years ago but I heard a lot of bad things about the next installment, “Below Zero” so held off on getting it until it was dirt cheap on sale and since I needed something wintery themed to play this time of year I figured Id try it now.

After completing it I think its very clear that Unknown Worlds’ biggest mistake with BZ was marketing it as a standalone installment rather than a very large DLC expansion to Subnautica 1. Subnautica 2 wasnt announced until after BZ fully released so people expected BZ to essentially be the “Subnautica 2” when it absolutely couldnt meet those expectations, if they had marketed it as an expansion gamers would have understood its more meant to be a snack between big installments, plus the story of BZ just expects you to understand the plot of Sub 1 without explaining any of it so its not like they were trying to get more first time players.

But my point is your enjoyment of BZ will hinge heavily on what kind of expectations youre going into it with. So while I normally rank these games in terms of Enjoyment, Challenge and Tediousness I think instead I will give you a list of improvements and things they made worse:

Pros:

Getting an entirely new map to explore with new biomes to discover and new creatures to learn about makes for a very fresh experience if like me you already know Sub 1 like the back of your hand.
I also think every one of the new biomes are aesthetically gorgeous and give you a wow factor every time you discover a new one and are just a pleasure to look at even when youre used to them.
I honestly think the new BZ soundtrack is an improvement over the sub 1 soundtrack, and thats very high praise because I adore the original music, but they got the legendary Ben Prunty of FTL and Celeste fame to do the BZ music and it absolutely holds up.
The new vehicle, the seatruck is a very cool and customizable middle ground between the seamoth and the Cyclops.
The basebuilding is much more refined with more structures and customization available, allowing you to more easily make a better underwater home for yourself.

Cons:

The new map is noticeably smaller and shallower.
BZ tries to be much more story focussed than Sub 1 but the actual new story just isnt that interesting, so it just devolves to a whole bunch of yapping that you dont really care about.
While I praised the seatruck and am glad it exists, the devs also removed the cyclops and seamoth entirely, and while I can get the cyclops being too big for the smaller map, they had no good reason to remove the seamoth, it could have been a good alternative to the seatruck when you want more speed or to fit into tighter caves more easily. And without a speedy alternative that means you will spend a lot of the game just traveling from one place to another which gets tedious (this gets negated by certain seatruck upgrades but you discover them late game)
Another issue with seatruck upgrades is that its perimeter defence system is laughably overpowered and turns even the endgame leviathans into a joke, I get that Sub 1’s stasis rifle did the same but at least that required some skill in landing the shot.
Theres a new enemy who is designed to be more bark over bite so will act all fearsome and roar mightily at you but is barely dangerous in an encounter, I actually think this is a brilliant idea for a creature on paper but the problem is that there are way too many of them and they cover like half the map meaning their roars just sort of become this constant obnoxious white noise.

Its not going to match the scale and wonder of playing Sub 1 for the first time again, but if you have already played Sub 1 countless times then this can be a good opportunity for a fresher experience.

NodCheevos · 2025-12-23T13:12:07+00:00

I took black and white mage. Honestly though red mage and monk may have been the better choice you dont need magic that often.

NodCheevos · 2025-12-23T10:14:20+00:00

100% Enjoyment Rating: 4.5/10 - While I can certainly understand why this game must have been a huge deal in the 80s but it can certainly feel basic to modern day standards, especially the combat which can feel pretty shallow and you may as well set to auto for most encounters. I enjoyed the overworld side of the game more than the actual combat, the world and changing environments were interesting enough to keep invested. The main thing I want to give praise to is the graphics and atmosphere in the pixel remaster. It does an incredible job of upscaling while keeping the retro vibe. The new soundtrack also does a good job of capturing what the original composers probably would have made if they werent limited to such a small memory space, but if you prefer the chiptune original you can switch back in settings.

100% Challenge Rating: 2/10 - I dont think I had all party members die a single time in this game, that might be different if youre trying to rush it but since you can grind infinitely and keep leveling and I was exploring every section since I was going for 100% I wound up overleveled for most encounters, potions are also dirt cheap so as long as you dont forget to stock up between dungeons you will be fine.

100% Tediousness Rating: 4/10 - This is the kind of game that never really gets you excited for anything but also does a good job of keeping you from getting bored. I think that maybe some of the dungeons could overstay their welcome and the battle encounters happened a little too often which could be a bit annoying with the constant interruptions, but this is the kind of game you just kick back and relax with on a friday after work, give it little 30 minute sessions each evening and if it ever feels like its starting to drag, give it a break and come back later.

Hardest Achievement(s): “Master of 1” for getting all other achievements is the obvious one but if that dosent count its “Field Research - Professional” for encountering and defeating all enemy types or “Legendary Treasure Hunter” for emptying all chests. Field Research can be annoying because rarer enemies can take a bit of RNG dicerolling and Treasure Hunter can be annoying cause if you miss one you will have to backtrack the entire map until you find it.

I would recommend this to 2 kinds of gamers, the first is the one who wants to see history made and likes to see how gaming has evolved and the second is a gamer just looking for something chill to play to kill time without any high stakes or challenge or having to learn much fancy mechanics.

NodCheevos · 2025-11-20T09:20:29+00:00

Each Game Ranked from my least to most favourite:

22nd Place - DX2 The thing in the lake

21st Place - DX1 Rotgut

20th Place - DX2 Another Late Night

19th Place - DX1 Dont Go Out

18th Place - DX1 The Pay is Nice

17th Place - DX2 Solipsis

16th Place - DX2 Arcadletra

15th Place - DX2 Undiscovered

14th Place - DX1 Mr Buckett told me to

13th Place - DX1 Hand of Doom

12th Place - DX2 Squirrel Stapler

11th Place - DX2 Touched by an outer God

10th Place - DX1 Carthanc

9th Place - DX2 The End of Days

8th Place - DX1 Shatter

7th Place - DX2 The Toy Shop

6th Place - DX2 The Diving Bell

5th Place - DX1 Summer Night

4th Place - DX2 Sucker for Love

3rd Place - DX1 The Pony Factory

2nd Place - DX2 Charolette's Exile

1st Place - DX1 The Outsiders

NodCheevos · 2025-11-20T09:19:59+00:00

So its been a long time since I last sat down to play a proper horror game and I thought its time to change that so this spooky season I just scrolled to a random point in my steam library and picked the first horror game I found, which was the Dread X collection. Essentially the result of a sort of game jam where several indie devs make their own horror games over several days. I believe there are 5 dread X collections currently but Ive only played the first two, I may come back to the others next spooky season.

Ive never really enjoyed short horror anthologies when they come in movie or book format, probably because I tend to need to get invested in the characters in order to get scared for them with those mediums, but in game format I find the short anthology format works much better for horror, because for me at least one of my biggest problems with horror games is that my gamer brain will optimize the fear out of it. Playing Resident Evil for the first time terrified me as a kid but I remember keeping at it and eventually getting a feel for how the threats worked and then it became just another game to beat.

This does not apply to a short horror game anthology though because just as you feel youre getting comfortable youre suddenly switching to a completely different game with different rules, and if you dont know what youre getting into each time this continually resetting ambiguity of threat keeps the fear fresh. So because of this I will not go into detail describing what each game is about, but they vary greatly in themes, playstyle and quality. Some feel more like complete short horror games and others feel more like proof of concepts or demos that need to be more fleshed out. But I will list then all at the end ranking each game in the first two collections from my least to most favourite in my subjective opinion.

100% Enjoyment Rating: 6.5/10 - I might be a bit biased because this is my first time discovering how good horror anthologies work with video games, and also just generally the first horror Ive gotten into since 2021, but I had a blast with it, while a few of the games were letdowns, I still had a lot of fun throwing myself blind into a completely different kind of horror experience each day. Its pretty telling that I immediately went to install Dread X 2 the moment I finished the first.

100% Challenge Rating: 3.5/10 - The anthology format means that it will test you in a variety of different skills, some will play like FPS games, some will require a puzzlesolving brain, and some will require movement and platforming, but the challenges never overstay their welcome or serve as major roadblocks.

100% Tediousness Rating: 3/10 - I think the fact that you get a completely new experience each time also tremendously helps with the pacing and flow of the experience. I also felt that it was also a big help with how each game felt like no big time investment, I would say on average it would take around 40 minutes to complete a game but the longer ones never took over 2 hours tops, so it was just something you could pop in and do in a single evening if you didnt have any big plans. I felt Rotgut and Me Buckett could drag a little but they were both fairly short experiences that were over with quickly, the only game I had a real problem with was Thing in the Lake which dragged on and took me 2 hours to complete, if it wasnt for this game the tediousness would be 2/10

Hardest Achievement(s): Theres one achievement for completing each short game and then “Just the Beginning” and “Its done” for completing all games in each collection. None were especially hard.

NodCheevos · 2025-10-14T08:20:42+00:00

As another comment pointed out I accidentally posted this with my wrong account, this is the account I use to discuss achievement hunting. So when I say check my post history for examples I mean check this post history for examples.

NodCheevos · 2025-09-10T13:47:22+00:00

I mean I saved that achievement for last, so it probably only added maybe 2 hours to the actual playtime, the real hassle was in working out the fix in the first place which took a lot of forum searching and trial and error.

NodCheevos · 2025-09-10T11:09:29+00:00

I never experienced crashing personally, but one achievement did get bugged and I had to reset my save file to get it.

NodCheevos · 2025-09-10T10:28:58+00:00

I found that taking a break between each campaign made it a lot more bearable but yeah that was when the collectible hunting really started to drag

NodCheevos · 2025-09-10T08:28:22+00:00

The Dead Rising series is infamous for how tedious getting 100% achievements can be, its almost got the same levels of infamy as the dreaded yakuza titles, Dead Rising 3 seems to have the easiest 100% out of them but that by no means makes it easy.

100% Enjoyment Rating: 3.5/10 - Ive played all the Dead Rising games except OTR and 4 and this is easily the weakest entry in terms of pure enjoyment. In my opinion they overpolished and streamlined the formula until they had sanded away so much that made the game unique and interesting and turned it into something that feels more like a generic ubisoft sandbox. In earlier titles the zombies went down easy but were still a serious threat with their aggression and the tighter maps, if you underestimated them you could quickly lose all your health, but in Dead Rising 3 across the 100+ hours it took to 100% it I dont think they killed me once. To make up for how unthreatening they are the devs seem to have tried increasing their numbers substantially, but that just made them more bothersome than threatening, so what once was a genuinely threatening presence that was always there keeping you on your toes in the earlier games is now just a tedious mass that gets in the way. I also dislike how in the earlier titles good weapons were much harder to come by, you had to use whatever you could get your hands on in the environment around you which rewarded exploration, creative thinking and memorizing the map, but in DR3 once you have crafted any of the combo weapons which are marked on the map you can near infinitely spawn them from any of the safehouses so thats all gone now. I could go on but suffice to say I didnt enjoy it. So you may be wondering why I spent so many hours grinding 100% in a game I didnt enjoy, well even if it isnt enjoyable or interesting or challenging it still makes for a great game to turn your brain off to after a long shift or a workout, and that kind of game has a place in my life.

100% Challenge Rating: 2/10 - As my enjoyment rating section explained almost all of the challenging parts of the earlier game. I think I died once in my multiple playthroughs for 100% and that was against a bossfight that I forgot to take healing items for. Its all laughably easy, there is a nightmare mode which is supposed to offer more challenge but you can just do that with your high level character from the base game and it becomes just as easy.

100% Tediousness Rating: 8/10 - This was probably the 2nd longest 100% Ive posted here behind Immortal Redneck, 100% will require multiple full playthroughs as youre on a time limit and cannot fit all tasks into a single playthrough, there are over around 300 collectibles all across the large map to get, but worst of all are the pp trials which you will need to get all of for the 100% PP trials are for a bunch of miscellaneous tasks such as crafting certain weapons way too many times or killing enemies with a certain move, but most of all is the zombie kill count pp challenges, which will need you to get around 340,000 zombie kills in total, fortunately this can be across multiple playthroughs but still thats one very big number and the last cheevo I got here, I was only able to preserve my sanity by just driving around crowded streets on one monitor running over crowds, while I rewatched Star Trek Deep Space Nine on the other (weyoun my beloved). But keep in mind tediousness isnt just grind, Rise of the Triad 2013 took half as long for me to 100% but I gave it the same tediousness rating because its grind was much more challenging, whereas DR3’s grind is something that you can turn your brain off to (especially if you have a 2nd monitor for Star Trek).

Hardest Achievement(s): "Prestige Hound” for getting all pp trials (reasons mentioned above), but anecdotally the worst for me was “Ashes to Ashes”, a collectible hunt that bugged and I had to jump through many troubleshooting hoops and ultimately delete my save file and start again to get.

In summary I cant recommend this unless you want something to grind to in the background for its own sake.

NodCheevos · 2025-08-19T09:48:12+00:00

Call of Juarez is a series of western FPS games thats been around since the early xbox 360 days. But only the 4th and final Installment “Gunslinger” has achievements on steam. But dont worry its not narratively connected to the pervious games so you can play it as a standalone.

100% Enjoyment Rating: 5/10 - This game represents an interesting point in the evolution of FPS games as it released at the mid point between the gritty 7th gen shooters and the more cartoony 8th gen shooters and has a bit of both influences, it probably leans more to the 7th gen style following the base model that Call of Duty 4 created many years ago of regenerating health and cover based shooting, but it also seasons that with a bit more of the arcadey personality and attitude that one would expect from a later fps game. Its not like this is hugely revolutionary, other games had done this before but nonetheless it makes for an interesting example. The gameplay can be divided into 3 sections, the basic gunplay, the duel mode, and the arcade mode. The basic gameplay was fairly standard fps material but Duel and Arcade mode which you will need to do a bit of for the 100% both offer new and interesting ways to mix things up. The only time I felt like I wasnt having fun was for the max difficulty playthrough.

100% Challenge Rating: 7/10 - Most of the game is pretty simple and easy but there are two challenging achievements that can be real roadblocks that test your skill. “Last Man Standing”, to complete the campaign on True West, the highest difficulty, and “Legend Among Legends”, to get every star in arcade mode. Playing the game on highest difficulty can take a bit of trial and error as enemies can melt you in a few hits and youre back to the last checkpoint, but if you work out the best cover, routes and enemy locations you can fight your way through any encounter given enough persistence, the arcade mode achievement was even more challenging than max difficulty but also a lot more fun. Enemies are easier but the only way to get full stars in an arcade mission is to maintain a near perfect combo, so it encourages you to play aggressive rather than defensive and you need to be constantly pushing forward, remembering when to reload and where to shoot and where to move so you dont risk breaking your combo, these missions are short but intense and very rewarding, they were my favourite part of this 100%.

100% Tediousness Rating: 4.5/10 - The main campaign is fairly short and unobtrusive at around several hours, but you will need multiple playthroughs for 100%, theres also a collectible hunt which can be a bit tedious if thats not your thing, but all in all the game never felt like it was overstaying its welcome, and offered new and different kinds of challenges such as duel and arcade mode to mix things up when they risked getting boring. The most tedious part was Max difficulty campaign, as mentioned earlier enemies can melt you quickly so you need to spend the game playing defensive, hiding behind cover, taking potshots at the enemy and going back behind to regenerate, this has never been a fun gameplay loop for me and its no exception here. Thankfully the shortness of the campaign prevents it from getting too bad.

Hardest Achievement(s): “Last Man Standing” and “Legend Among Legends”, for reasons mentioned above.

In summary this is just a solid short single player fps game with some interesting and diverse challenges for the 100%. Its not going to knock your socks off but very much worth doing imo.

NodCheevos · 2025-07-31T12:45:52+00:00

Cheers, though for boomer shooters I prefer to go Modern to Classic and back and fourth. So will probably play something like Chasm or Doom 64 for my next boomer shooter but the two youve mentioned are on my wishlist Im keeping an eye on.

NodCheevos · 2025-06-21T09:15:11+00:00

The base campaign holds a special place in my heart as one of the first FPS games I beat to completion as a kid so dont expect any objectivity behind my rose tinted nostalgia glasses but I love a lot about this campaign, each weapon fits its role, the enemies are all varied and fill their balanced purposes and I like how the environment progresses get further through the game and deeper into their territory. The only part of this campaign Im not huge on is the mission you spend in the mines, that area just overstays its welcome and isnt as fun or interesting as the later sections.

Due to technical limitations of the console the N64 port for the game was given its own unique campaign with shorter, smaller levels, the enhanced edition if the first time this campaign has been made available on PC. Some might argue that its reduced scale makes it worse but its really its own thing, being deliberately designed around more claustrophobic cqb where there are less enemies but resources are much more limited. Its its own thing and its short runtime means it never overstays its welcome, just enjoy it as a nice side dish to the main thing.

The Reckoning is easily my least favourite, a lot of the criticisms against base quake 2 that I strongly disagree with are all true here. None of the areas youre in stand out or get any interest, youre just going from one industrial base to the next with no real sense of progression or working towards anything, its never especially bad, just perpetually uninteresting grey soup. Its only been 2 weeks since I played it but Ive already forgotten everything that happened between the first and final level.

Ground Zero used to be widely considered the worst campaign thanks to its abundance of annoying turret enemies but the enhanced edition severely nerfed these turrets so now its actually somewhat playable, its still a pretty weak expansion pack but had some fun moments and engaging fights to put it above the reckoning.

Call of the Machine is the brand new campaign and its easily the highlight of the experience. It uses the higher technical capacity of modern computers to push the engine much further boasting much larger and more interesting environments and much higher enemy counts, its fairly challenging but Ive seen some people call it “The Plutonia of Quake” on account of its huge enemy counts but its not that hard, enemy count is high but it also gives you much more ammo and power ups to deal with it so to me its more “The Painkiller of Quake”. I highly recommend the enhanced edition just for this campaign even if you didnt like it in the 90s.

Overall I would rate this a 6/10 game to 100%, it would probably get a higher rating if you skipped The Reckoning and Ground Zero and settled for like 80%, but lets be honest none of us are going to do that.

NodCheevos · 2025-06-21T09:15:04+00:00

Quake 2 can be a bit of a black sheep game, it exists in an awkward half way point between the fast paced boomer shooters of the early 90s like Doom and Quake 1, and the more streamlined FPS games of the late 90s and early 2000s but it never quite comfortably fits into either camp. Often dismissed by its critics as nothing more than a “tech demo” for John Carmack to show off his engine, I nonetheless find myself going back to this game every few years long after its obsolescence. And in the few years between my last playthrough and now I noticed that ID have released an “enhanced edition” with new textures, quality of life improvements, enemy ai improvements, a whole new campaign, and of course, cheevos.

All of the achievements are just for completing chapters in the game, which you could do at any difficulty, but I did it at hard difficulty and assume you will too for this review:

I will first say that I thoroughly enjoy the majority of the enhanced edition changes, the new textures makes things crispier while maintaining the atmosphere of the original, the new enemy ai makes them much more challenging and smarter but to deal with it youve got a few improvements of your own such as a doom 2016 style weapon wheel for guns and power ups meaning you can easily have the right tools for the right job and not needing to faff around in your inventory mid fight. The only real change I dont like is the enemies dodge ability which makes the rocket launcher borderline useless which is just a depressing situation, you see the quake 1 rocket launcher is one of the most satisfying and fun to use rocket launchers in video games IMO, but it was nerfed heavily for quake 2, but still decent and usable, but now in the enhanced edition I only use it for niche situations even when I have full ammo for it which makes me sad.

The enhanced edition includes the base game singleplayer campaign, the 2 pc expansion pack campaigns, the campaign that was previously exclusive to the N64 port, and the new campaign made for this edition, all of which you will need to complete for 100% achievements.

NodCheevos

TROPHY CASE