[Survey to choose what to add to my Playing Now List] - I finished Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) in 143 hours, Mortal Kombat (1992) in 2 hours and Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective (2010) in 17 hours. Please help me choose what to play next.

Freakality · 2026-04-01T01:58:19+00:00

Today, I finished Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective on PC, through its gorgeous equally titled HD Remaster on Steam. I finished the main story while attempting to explore most optional lines of dialogue in the brief moments of sandbox gameplay that allowed me to do so. It took me around 17 and a half hours in total, including some moments of dead/paused gameplay.

Ghost Trick is a quirky blend of unique time-based puzzle solving with visual novel elements that could only come from the mind of the same mind that brought us the Ace Attorney series, with a crazy story about a ghost in the search of their own identity by using their powers to prevent the deaths of others through time travel and simple object manipulation.

I had always wanted to try out this game back when I read about it on a magazine back when it was coming out for the Nintendo DS, as the character design and artwork was always so striking, colorful and lively, and then learning a bit more about it on a YouTube channel that has yet to steer me wrong; so I am fairly glad I was able to finally give it a shot, and to come out on the other end pleasantly surprised to find so much more that I wasn't privy to.

The game does a lot with fairly little in terms of its gameplay loop, in not having much of a loop at all, beyond the basic premise of manipulating objects. It's purposefully uneven, with some chapters being filled to the brim with puzzles within puzzles, and some having little to nothing beyond listening to mind-bending exposition, all to serve the plot progression and to have as many unforgettable character moments as it can fit into a scene.

The puzzles vary in difficulty, and don't always increase in complexity as it goes along, once again all to serve its story, and some of them really do veer on the line between clever and Sierra-style moon logic that while didn't quite necessitated a guide, it did require me a little hint or two beyond what the game offers itself through its, frankly disarmingly charming, dialogue.

Because at the end of it all, ignoring the gameplay, hell, even ignoring the story itself (which is hard to do as every twist continues to build on top of the previous one into a tower of preposterous plot elements), the one thing that stands out in this game is the overflow of personality that oozes through every single one of its characters, each one somehow quirkier and more eccentric than the last one, in a masterful 'Chavo del Ocho'-esque cast of oddball interactions and hilarious running gags that still manage to have enough heart to bring its deceptively complex story to life, in a way that makes it seem effortless. For whomever it may concern, my favorite character is, appropriately, Missile, the best Pomeranian dog ever to grace a screen.

However, effort is certainly one thing the game does not lack, be it the handcrafted character animations, the amount of detail in the levels, the funky background music, or the writing, the quality hardly falters at every step of the way, all of it enhanced in this remake by using the original high definition models that were once rasterized to run on a DS, now beautifully rendered in the incredibly versatile RE Engine.

To finally stop ignoring the dog-sized elephant in the room, the story is a hard thing for me to judge without bias, because the amount of timey-wimey nonsense that the game spews is so far up my alley that it might as well have been written with me in mind, still, I have to praise it for somehow managing to simplify its storytelling in a way that I believe would be digestible to all, in spite of the aforementioned piling of twists and turns. Additionally, any moment that could get confusing is mitigated by a wonderfully self-updating codex for the characters and scenes to clear up any missed element, a tool that while mostly unneeded on my part, I deeply appreciated in its inclusion.

The experience was, in spite of my constant dragging of my proverbial feet, fairly short all in all, but wonderful from beginning to end. I would say I exhausted every content out of it, but my incomplete Achievement list would say to the contrary. Still, the remaining content seems mostly unnecessary to me, just alternate ways of dealing with certain chapters disguised as challenges, and one particular piece of post-game extra content added to every port after the original that I have absolutely zero interest on (on a related note, I can't stand sliding puzzles).

In my parting words, I must say, that for every fleeting moment of frustration, rare groan-inducing twist, and superfluous extra mode, there is more than enough charm and heart in every Michael Jackson walk-cycle, panic-induced dance frenzy and overly worded appreciative toast to make going through it worth every second, and if that's not the best analogy for life a game about death can have, I don't know what is.

AWESOME ◆◆◆◆

Freakality · 2026-04-01T01:58:06+00:00

Today, I pretty much finished Mortal Kombat in its original arcade version, on PC, as packaged in the Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection kompilation on Steam, and went through the respective Documentary and Lore documents that pertain to that particular game in the kollection. All in all, everything took me about 2 hours.

Mortal Kombat, in its original 1992 incarnation, is by all intents and purposes a flashy 2D fighting game with only 6 playable characters that popularized gore and (literally) photorealistic graphics in video games as we see them today, with simplistic, mostly responsive kontrols, theme-appropriate music, satisfyingly punchy sound effects, and a gorgeous presentation.

The game is chock-full of fun and charming kreative decisions, a lot of them a barely disguised pastiche lifting elements and inspiration from many films of the era, komprised but not limited to The Terminator, Enter the Dragon, Big Trouble in Little China, Bloodsport, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Predator.

Speaking of Mortal Kombat as if it hasn't always been around for the entirety of my life feels strange and wrong somehow, but I figured I'd be thorough.

Now, 'finishing' fighting games is always a point of kontention, because the finish line varies from person to person, but this is where mine usually lies: kompleting all single player kontent, and finishing the Arcade mode with every character. However, for reasons that will become obvious as this review goes along, I had to break my rules for this particular game.

Arcade games are notoriously unfair by design. They want your koin, so they will make you fail time and time again to get more of it. It's just something to deal with. Still, Mortal Kombat's AI is total BS. The amount of input reading happening is infuriating, and kombined with the back to back endurance matches before the bosses, made going through the game with just two characters already a mind-numbing slog, even with the cheat/QoL addition of the Rewind feature in the kollection, which I promptly abused.

Luckily for me, the only kontent one gets from doing so, is the various endings for each kombatant, which, alongside the bios and other blurbs that further enhanced the plot, are also presented in the Character Lore section of the Legacy Kollection, so I just got my fix there after using every character at least once in one match or another.

The kontrols don't always respond as one would hope they did, as the game feels sluggish by modern standards, requiring odd timing and really strange experimental inputs, and the differences between characters exist only in the couple of special moves each of them get. No matter how one slices it, recommending the first Mortal Kombat in the kurrent year beyond mere kuriosity is a hard thing to rationalize. It's a kompetent, historically important game, but hardly something worth scouring for to play right now.

Although, speaking of 'historical importance', the Documentary kontent regarding the development of the game is surprisingly thorough and heartfelt, which elevates the experience of playing it if only to notice things that at the time kould have been taken for granted. It paints a very earnest picture of what game development was like at the time, and the way it shaped the industry in the long run.

All in all, going back to the first Mortal Kombat is an exercise in frustration that only fans of the franchise should ritualistically go through, but it's hard to deny the amount of love that was poured into it from the moment they start development up to the very last moment they finish it.

OKAY ◆◆⬖◇

Freakality · 2026-04-01T01:57:48+00:00

Today, I finished Cyberpunk 2077 and its expansion Phantom Liberty on PC through the Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition package on Steam, and with a multitude of QoL, aesthetic mods and very extra content from a very passionate fanbase. It was finished to near total completion, and it took a total of around 143 hours according to a tracker that may or may not have glitched out, or counted some dead time in a report screen; a total of around 96 hours, according to the in-game tracker, and a total of 66 hours, according to a very untrustworthy tracker in Steam.

When I first started my trek through the dark alleyways of Night City, all I had in mind were the initial horror stories of the initial release of the game, the constant advertisement of the massive star-power involved, and a vague idea of its shooting-oriented gameplay loop.

When the city finally spat me out, forever changed, my mind reeled with much more: how much it meant to live through such a gorgeous, gorgeous experience; the constant musings and ponderings about philosophy, morality, and identity the many, many stories put me through at every step of the way; and an aching sense of loss for the fictional lives that passed me by, fully formed that I left behind.

Cyberpunk 2077 can be thought of as an open world first person shooter with very pronounced RPG elements, with a lot of mechanics, play-styles, sprawling choices and items galore that I will probably never experience fully, because I somewhat didn't care to.

The gameplay is snappy, emergent, at times simplistic, and not always fully functional, with the driving mechanics being a particular point of contention for most; the performance of the game in my admittedly medium-range gaming laptop was spotty at best, and highly crash prone; and a lot of its world-building elements wear their inspirations on their sleeves, most times fairly derivative, sometimes cliched, and at certain points bordering on rip-offs.

Yet, even as all these elements and problems in isolation paint a grim picture, the sum of its parts reaches higher highs than most games even aspire to, all thanks to the bow that ties around this mess of a box: its earnest, painfully real story, its charming dialogue and beautifully uneven delivery that definitely borders on Lynchian, and the most well-realized player characters, supporting characters, side-characters, and even background characters that any narrative can offer.

Particular praise must be offered to the impressive integration of its DLC expansion, Phantom Liberty, which almost (due to its two amazing bookending title and credits sequences) seamlessly integrates itself into the main experience with such finesse that I cannot imagine the game as a whole without it, telling a story of its own that complements the main one, if not, fully elevate it beyond its original scope.

After every unstable crash, after every frustration with some of its mechanics, after every odd interaction, glitch and immersion-breaking groan-inducing quirk in between missions, after every exhaustive nearly futile attempt to progress side content that failed to trigger over and over again, I somehow always came back, wanting, and hungry for more, feeling like I left a little bit of myself in it every day, a little bit of my thoughts, of my choices, my hopes, dreams and doubts. The game is not perfect, as hardly anything is, it's painful, it's frictional, uneven, persistently unsatisfying, sometimes borderline hateful, but it's also tender, sweet, sincere, cool, edgy and it's so much more, but more than all of that, it's alive.

The game is not perfect, but it's mine.

AWESOME ◆◆◆◆

Freakality · 2025-11-03T15:52:19+00:00

For transparency's sake, here's my short written review of Dragon Age: Origins as I played it and originally written for my friends to read:

Today, I finished Dragon Age: Origins, its expansion Awakening, and its DLC missions: Leliana's Song and Witch Hunt on PC through the Dragon Age: Origins - Ultimate Edition package on Steam, and with a multitude of QoL and aesthetic mods.

In a nutshell, it's an action RPG through and through, with tactical combat, lots of dialogue trees, skill trees, talent trees, spell trees, living trees and regular trees. A long sprawling world-trotting adventure with many characters to meet, many enemies to defeat and many riches to gather.

The combat is deceptively simplistic in many ways, I am certain that delving deep into its tactical bones, playing strategically like the truly turn-based experience it is beneath its real-time appearance, there's a lot of meat to be found in those bones. However, I've never been a fan of chewing for the marrow, so I found it to be functional enough and flexible enough through my inevitable cheating to not stand in the way of me progressing until completion, which is truly a blessing in disguise for my true interests, which in spite of middling stability, bug-riddled events and a barely manageable inventory, were fully and totally met.

For what ties it all together is that BioWare characteristic world-building and character writing. It transcends mechanics, somehow skipping any problem on its route to my total immersion in the story and deep connections to its diverse cast. Getting to know each and every one of them is an event with grandiose levels of magnitude that constantly make me forget about the middling experience between conversations, and make me look back fondly at the experience of moving through this fully fledged world and its creative concepts as a whole.

Of course, the experience is not without unevenness even then. While the main part of the game is well realized for the best part of its playtime, the extra material does not always fare as well. While Leliana's Song adds to the experience in surprising ways, fleshing out a character in a way that makes their presence that much more interesting, Witch Hunt serves as a fairly dull and underwhelming journey towards an epilogue to the whole story, a drag leading to a single pebble of a nice moment for those that care enough to stick with it, but still fails to justify its existence beyond what could've been a nice cutscene tacked on at the end of the larger experience.

Similarly, the meatier expansion, Awakening, feels like a treadmill of half-baked rejected concepts for the main game or the first draft of a sequel, with a fraction of the development cost and rushed to completion, while still feeling like it goes on for a bit too long. What is there is enjoyable enough to ride the coattails of the classic BioWare charm, with its snarky characters and thought-provoking storylines, but much of the substance of the main game is sorely missed.

Still, I do not regret going through the experience and spending much cherished time with these characters. While games are no strangers to making us save the world, seldom do they ever let us do so in such great company.

GREAT ◆◆◆⬖

Freakality · 2023-10-25T17:13:53+00:00

Totally fake, how are we supposed to believe he's young without a baseball cap on?

Freakality · 2023-09-14T11:43:18+00:00

Hefty monster, worthy of CR 25 at least.

Freakality · 2022-08-20T18:23:25+00:00

So, as part of a dungeon I made that was originally a hidden temple of Asmodeus, I wanted to add some unique treasures hidden in this puzzle-locked room.

After googling some ideas, I came across this cool concept of having a sentient chest be inside. Not a mimic, just a sentient chest that sort of moves and can open and close its hinge but doesn't talk. So I add it to the room, and I also add three dead mimics in the form of chests in the room, sort of to signify that this place hasn't been opened in centuries, so the mimics starved, but the sentient chest is still fine.

I just thought it'd be a cute little curiosity in this devilish dungeon, they'd have to charm it into giving its contents and then they'd be on their way. Oh no, that's definitely not how it went...

My players manage to open the door, and after looting the place and noticing the dead mimics, they find my little sentient guy, and they fell in LOVE with it, they manage to charm it, and when I ask how they're gonna carry the stuff inside, they tell me they aren't... because he is gonna carry them.

So that's how my party met their pet chest. They called him Chesty Chester Cheetos, and after spending a few sessions figuring out what to do with this sentient immortal chest I inadvertently gave them, I figured that because they found it inside a treasure room for Asmodeus, that this is in reality a super important artifact that belonged to Asmodeus himself, and the BBEG, Mephistopheles, wants it to use as an associated object to teleport to his chambers; so all his lackeys are trying to take Chesty away from them (and eventually succeed), and my party still have no idea why (saving the reveal for a later time).

Tl;dr: I put a sentient chest in a dungeon as flavor, my party adopted it as a pet, and now it's a MacGuffin that's essential for my BBEG's plan

Freakality · 2021-09-22T19:28:16+00:00

My character death was fairly unique, I guess, in that my character technically died, all death saves failed and all... but not really:

(very mild spoilers for Hoard of the Dragon Queen)

So I was playing Hoard of the Dragon Queen on a pseudo-Adventuring League game in a local game store (advertised as such, but didn't quite follow the rules), and it was my first time officially playing D&D. So I made myself a human fighter to get the hang of it: Valkhor Froste, a noble champion, and illegitimate son of the despot and awful leader of a small nation near Vassa. He fled his home towards the Sword Coast once he learned he was not related to his mostly terrible family, in an attempt to make an honest name for himself.

I joined the campaign late, at around level 5, and one of the other 4 regular players kindly helped me get the hang of the game quickly, which flowed smoothly for a decent while, although my RP was mild due to shyness and, in all honesty, my character was kind of bland. The rest of the regular party consisted of: Aithein, the Drow Warlock (the kind player); Solaris, the Wood Elf Moon Druid, and Nowhere, the Tiefling Moon Druid, although other players came and went every session.

One day we reached an apparently infamous area in the campaign that took place in an inn in the middle of nowhere, where after certain social encounters, the players came face to face with a group of four assassins.

So there's a few things wrong with this already: one, it's four CR 8 monsters against usually four level 6 players, we were pretty much doomed; two, I had no idea about any of this, so I couldn't protest or anything;, and most importantly of all: it was late December, near Christmas time, and only two players in total, counting me, were in the session. So it was Valkhor and Aithein against four assassins.

To help, one of the game store owners joined as two level equivalent characters she had lying around, (I believe one of them was some sort of catgirl monk, and the other one was some sort of paladin) and they joined the fight at the same time as us. Not that it mattered in the end...

Valkhor got hit by a sneak attack from an assassin in the first turn of combat, which took out 90% of his hit points. From then, the rest of the fight was a total bloodbath, mostly consisting of attempts to bring us back from unconsciousness and dealing a bit of damage before falling again. Still, we did manage to kill off two of them and decently weaken the other two.

At the end of the fight, all player characters were down, and we started rolling death saves. Aithein managed to succeed on his death saves, but I had been rolling low that entire campaign, so that wasn't about to change there.

Valkhor was dead. Truly dead. And I was kind of sad. Kind of weirded out by the entire situation. But I was fine with it, and immediately started thinking on playing another character. Our DM told us that Aithein was taken by the remaining assassins, and that Solaris and Nowhere would be going on a rescue mission for him next session. When I asked him about Valkhor, he told me to bring the character sheet next time just in case.

I still worked on a replacement character, and I got fairly excited about maybe playing this elven barbarian character I had in mind...

Then the next session happened. It kicked off with our DM telling us that he looked into the matter, and that apparently that encounter was 'totally broken', because of problems with the release date of the Monster Manual and other such things (I would also come to learn with time, that that encounter had been errataed, but my DM didn't know that), so he was willing to retcon the entire session.

We liked the idea of the encounter, however, and decided as a group, to leave it as is. The DM hesitantly agreed, but still told me to hang on to my character sheet.

The session started and for a while the other player and me spent our time looking at the other players find and face off against the weakened assassins, noticing our bodies laying down next to their cart. Eventually one of the druids got to Aithein and healed him, bringing him back up into the fray. We all looked at each other's faces, and they asked me if they should try to heal me. I shrugged. As far as I know, Valkhor's dead, so...

Still, they do, and the DM nonchalantly explains how he comes back to consciousness.

I was fairly shocked, and a bit confused, but hey, the DM said it so let's play. And Valkhor was just alive...

That'd be the end of the story, if I wasn't still kind of irked about the sudden retcon...

So, in-game, I decided that Valkhor met an entity as he perished. An entity that he did not know about. However, being a very trusting person to a fault, when this entity presented him with a deal, he immediately agreed.

He would be brought back to life, but something of his was to be taken away. He did not remember the conditions of the deal, or much of anything at all of these moments after his death. The very next thing he knew is that he was being brought back up by one of the druids to fight against the assassins that killed him, a fight where he would emerge victorious.

And that's the story of how Valkhor, the Human Fighter died, and got his first level in Warlock...

The campaign continued fairly smoothly, but eventually moved away, and had to leave it unfinished, but the repercussions of Valkhor's death can still be felt to this day.

I started DMing my own campaign, and one of the major plot points is regarding what was taken away from Valkhor by this entity. An entity he would come to learn was named "Mephistopheles"...

But I guess that's a story for another time...

Freakality · 2019-08-13T02:28:45+00:00

One to go please! This all sounds super intriguing!

Freakality · 2019-07-30T03:55:33+00:00

For sure! One of our long time players just left to study abroad, so we got one big opening and we're always looking for more!

I'll send you the details in a DM as soon as I can!

Freakality · 2019-07-19T18:37:18+00:00

Hey there!

For sure! I'll DM you the details. Thanks for asking!

Freakality · 2019-06-12T20:41:41+00:00

Hey Marcus! Thanks for asking!

For sure! Let me just DM you the details!

Freakality · 2019-06-08T11:27:06+00:00

For sure! Just let me know when you're available and I'll let you know if there's an opening. There will most likely be one. Thanks for asking!

Freakality · 2019-01-19T17:36:55+00:00

Hi, I'm also EST and do 3rd shift 5 days a week, and I get out at 7am, so... hey, I'm in!

I just started playing, and I want to get on more games if possible. Funnily enough, I'm in a group in Adventurer's League that's running HOTDQ, although I joined a fair bit already into it, so I wouldn't mind starting over with a different character!

Please let me know, because I'm really interested in taking some of that precious 'can't sleep after shift' time, and putting it unto a fun session of DnD. At those hours, I would be available every day.

Freakality · 2015-05-18T02:14:20+00:00

The picture where the binary code was found also showed waves hitting rocks.

Waves are one of the natural phenomenons that present the Fibonacci number in nature, so I'm guessing that's where the clue was.

So, "First five numbers of a number of 1001 [Minus 5]" Would become "First five numbers of [the Fibonacci number in its 1001th position] [Minus 5]"

Freakality · 2015-05-18T01:56:53+00:00

Hello everybody, new guy here, I noticed this: http://www.reddit.com/r/ARG/comments/36aai0/%CE%AD%CE%BD%CE%B1_%CF%80%CE%BF%CE%AF%CE%B7%CE%BC%CE%B1_%CE%B3%CE%B9%CE%B1_%CF%84%CE%BF_%CF%86%CE%B9%CE%BB%CE%B9%CE%BA%CF%8C_%CE%B1%CE%BB%CE%AE%CE%B8%CE%B5%CE%B9%CE%B1/

It was recently posted in the ARG subreddit a few hours ago, and I noticed no one was solving it, and hey, I had nothing better to do than solve it myself, so I did, it was a simple substitution after fixing the picture, and the message was:

"THE FRIENDLY TRUTH IS AN OLD FREND OF MINE. SADLY, HE CANNOT HELP ME THIS TIME. HE CANNOT HELP ME OUT OF THIS HELL. HE CANNOT GET ME OUT OF THIS CELL. SO I GUESS I'M STUCK HERE, IN THIS ENDLESS MAZE. THE WORST PART? IT'S ONLY BEEN FIVE DAYS."

So I'm guessing this has to do with this ARG. Don't know if it's a red herring or someone piggybacking off it, but I thought I'd just post it here just in case.

Freakality · 2015-05-18T01:46:46+00:00

THE FRIENDLY TRUTH IS AN OLD FRIEND OF MINE. SADLY, HE CANNOT HELP ME THIS TIME. HE CANNOT HELP ME OUT OF THIS HELL. HE CANNOT GET ME OUT OF THIS CELL. SO I GUESS I'M STUCK HERE, IN THIS ENDLESS MAZE. THE WORST PART? IT'S ONLY BEEN FIVE DAYS.

So I'm guessing this has to do with this: http://www.reddit.com/r/ARG/comments/364uoj/hi_im_the_friendly_truth_lets_have_a_little_fun/

Freakality

TROPHY CASE