Short Reviews of Games Played In Q1 2023

Chained Echoes is an amazing RPG that reminds me so much of the RPGS I played when I was young. The story starts a bit confusing but it also starts right away, hope that makes sense. Special about this RPG is RPG is the looks and the story. The combat felt also unique for me because you try to keep some sort of balance. You don’t want to always do the attacks that are your favorite in this turn-based battle system because you might end up in the red part of the bar and being very vulnerable.

I also liked this board full of challenges, that will help you become stronger but are also tied to achievements. You had basic ones like “kill X amount of monster type X, fully discover the map in area Y, and stuff like that. however, there were also a lot of very specific ones for completing a monster with X amount of team members and other weird ones.

The game itself is very challenging, but you can turn down the difficulty in the settings menu and still unlock all the achievements. None of the achievements are missable and completion takes around 55h.

Why I wasn’t able to 100% it? It had nothing to do with the game itself but everything with my personal life. Just before starting this my grandma died and I thought the bad luck of this year would stop there. Sadly this wasn’t the case and it wasn’t the only funeral that happened in the first quarter of 2023. It simply came down to my mind not being in the right place to be able to focus on a story. I really hope to give Chained Echoes another shot when everything has settled down and I just can relax and enjoy a good game with a great story. I played Chained Echoes for 23h and enjoyed it so much!

Masterplan Tycoon is a resource management game with a bit of a spreadsheet feeling, which I totally didn’t mind. It had colorful and helpful graphics, nothing outstanding but that added to the game in this case. You make different factories to be able to make another product further down in the production line, so for example you need cows, to make milk, to make cheese. You do this by placing down the buildings somewhere on the land and drawing lines from the input and output area of the building.

You start with this very big map and start simple. Some people complain that the tutorial takes too long, but the tutorial gives you each objective, and I was glad I got some tips on where to go next and what to do. You’ll also have entries on the map that will take you to a different map. For that, you first need to attach an input line with the kind of goods they want and then you can go to the new map, and work on there to at the end get an output of another product on your main land. You’ll also be able to unlock upgrades so things get a bit easier or get a bit faster. None of the achievements are missable and the game takes around 12h to complete.

Why I wasn’t able to 100% it? I’m just not smart enough to be able to finish this. The game gets more challenging the further you get and I really struggled with the limestone challenge. I barely was able to finish it but then my output to the main map was just too slow. So I decided to clear the map on the limestone mission and start over… but then I didn’t have enough space for anymore, so cleared everything again to start over again… And I got stuck in that loop. That mission map is just so small, everything has to be efficient and I somehow can’t figure out how to do it well enough for the output to the main island to work well enough. Many people have been able to get past this point and complete the game, so clearly I’m missing the brains to keep a good overview and spatial awareness to figure this out.