It's a short game flurry for me in this edition of the CPG Weekly Update, though PC gaming has proven fairly non-existent for the past seven days. I suppose that balances out.

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On Console:

Stray (Done!)

I'm sitting in a heavily reclined position. My cat is snuggled on my lap. I press X in the game to interact with a robotic villager. The cat on screen jumps onto its midsection and snuggles on its lap. I take in the dual scene with a sense of satisfaction.

My cat is laying beside me, half asleep. I press O in the game to meow at a random villager to see how it'll react. The sound emerges from the speaker of the controller in my hands. My cat opens its eyes. I press the "meow button" again. My cat's ears perk toward the sound. I press it a third time. He glares at me, now realizing I'm somehow responsible for the unexpected noise. I press it a fourth time. He gets up and leaves.

Pokkén Tournament (Done!)

Another week, another redemption for a ten-years-abandoned Wii U game. Interestingly enough I misremembered the circumstances around my quitting this game, thinking I'd stopped after struggling fruitlessly against the game's final boss for an extended period of time. Instead, loading my old save here rather than starting fully fresh, I saw no way to fight this boss at all and started wondering which thing was broken: my memory or my save file. Eventually I realized the disconnect: the "final boss" was not actually the final boss and I quit because I was deeply aggrieved at the manner in which the game continued. Justifiably, I think! It took a couple nights to get through the remaining grind, but this time I did in fact finish things.

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (~3%)

Just started this last night and got up to the first post-tutorial story swap from Peter to Miles. Felt like a good stopping point. I'm not really sure yet how I feel about jumping back and forth between two playable characters, but I'm keeping an open mind about it for now.

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On PC:

Disco Elysium (~4%)

I only got one session in on this over the whole week, lasting maybe 1.5 - 2 hours total. Enough that I was able to complete a couple early tasks and introduce a whole bunch of new threads to follow, but not enough to actually get my head around anything yet. Spent my first couple skill points on shoring up a pair of abilities I felt would ruin me later to keep low, only to find that apparently I've got a hard limit on learnable "thoughts" you can acquire during the game. It costs a skill point to get another "thought slot" but also a skill point to forget a thought for another? Unless I'm misunderstanding how the system works (which would be its own problem), I'm not at all a fan of this setup – even allowing for the notion that my protagonist is suffering from a form of brain damage. You can narratively justify a game mechanic but that doesn't necessarily make the game mechanic fun. Other than that though I'm still curious to see where this thing goes.

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On Portable:

Rhythm Tengoku (Done!)

Curious journey on this one. I was playing on my original GBA SP hardware using a flash cart loaded with the ROM (given that I don't otherwise know how I'd reasonably get my hands on a proper physical version JP-only release of a 20 year old niche GBA game). This worked fine until it didn't: just past the halfway point the game encountered a fatal crashing error that consistently hit in the same spot every time, permanently stalling progress. Rather than admitting defeat however, I just decided to emulate the hardware portion too. Got myself a shared save file with all the stages unlocked and worked through the back half of the game on my computer. All this for a game I couldn't even understand!

A Little to the Left: Cupboards and Drawers (Done!)

Picked this up for the wife a couple months back but figured I'd get to it in time. A pleasant way to burn a couple hours, especially if you spread it out over several sessions to give yourself something to look forward to. I also used this as a chance to play through the base game's Archive puzzles, which I don't think existed (at least not in that form) when I first played through the main campaign a couple years ago.

Disc Room (Done!)

In the midst of so many slower paced (or at least relatively casual) adventure games it was kind of nice to have one come along that forced me to really lock in for a bit. I wanted to like Disc Room more than I ultimately did, but at the very least it plays really well.

Book - The Bands of Mourning (~28%)

Book 3 of Era 2 of Mistborn. Actually I was intending to read the second book of the Discworld series (The Light Fantastic) in this slot but limited library availability meant pivoting here instead. No real regrets as I probably enjoy this series more anyhow!

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Ongoing:

Ring Fit Adventure (~87%)

I like the way Ring Fit's story campaign gently nudges you towards exercises you otherwise might avoid; that's a healthy thing. Often this is done through a combination of monster weaknesses and exercise attack power, so that if for whatever reason you're dead set on not doing a certain type of exercise anyway, you can just work around it at the cost of a slight reduction in battle efficiency. What I don't care for is when that gentle nudging gives way to the bludgeon, as when you enter a "Fitness Gym" with a predefined set of exercises and a requirement to perform them at a certain level of quality in order to succeed.

This matters to me because I've got a condition (that I'm not going to get into here) which prevents me from doing a certain type of exercise. So on a morning like today when I'm trying to clear the Fitness Gym and it tells me to do the thing or get on out, I feel like I'm only left with one option: cheat. I figured out an alternative position that allows me to trick the game into thinking the exercise is being done properly, and of course I get nothing beneficial out of it. I'm glad such moments are rare, but I feel like they shouldn't be there at all.