June & July 2022 Channel Update - A Delayed Post is Eventually Good, But A Rushed One Is Forever Bad

Hi all,

First off, apologies for the late update post! Towards the end of June I had been feeling really overloaded. Something had to give, and I decided a delayed update post is better than delayed videos...

(FYI when things don’t go as planned I do try to tweet out quick updates so you’re not just in the dark, which is what I did prior to this post as well!)

Let’s quickly get to the meat of things!!!

Finished Since Last Update

TUNIC (26 parts): WHEW… this started out as a cutesy foxy combat adventure and turned into something else. Not quite what I expected but it was truly a fun, unique, high-effort-begets-high-reward type of experience. My brain is tired now, it needs a vacation 🤣 

This is one of those games I’d recommend anyone with even a remote passing interest in it to try for themselves first before watching videos/looking stuff up!

Horizon Forbidden West (122 parts): Finally! My original HZD playthrough was about 60-70 parts, so this took much longer than expected.

I poured out most of my thoughts in the videos already but in short: I enjoyed the HFW storyline! It’s an engaging expansion into the Horizon world with some great memorable moments. On the gameplay side of things though I felt there wasn’t enough innovation/evolution from what was already in HZD: the open world can feel quite static and there are little mechanic annoyances here and there (ie. still having to spam left/right a million times to find the one potion or item you want to use).

Don’t get me wrong: HFW is a big budget AAA title, and there’s a baseline of quality associated with that that it absolutely meets. Just for the storyline I would unconditionally play anything in this series anyway lol, but I do wish it would’ve pushed the envelope to become something more. Maybe for Horizon 3!

Progress on Current Stuff

Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong: I’m moving into the final three scenes of the story now. It’s rough around the edges (had to restart levels multiple times to get around bugs etc) but I think the story is engaging, and not in a “Lol The Council Is So Bad It’s Good” kind of way either. I’m very pleasantly surprised - will have to see if this can stick the landing!

The Quarry: A spooky choose-your-own-adventure game from the makers of Until Dawn. Currently I’m at about Chapter 8 of 12. This is some good campy horror fun and I love a lot of the dumb teenager dialogue too lmao.

(Apparently you can't strike out text in Patreon so Pretend This Is Struck Out Okay) TBH I also haven’t been finding this scary………… am I evolving into NotScaredyCatWelonz…?????

AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES – nirvanA Initiative: The sequel to the first Somnium Files which some of you might remember was a Patreon poll winner back in 2019! By the creator of the Zero Escape series, it’s a detective mystery visual novel with really weird ass Japanese things but also a ton of heart and character.

I haven’t played much (any) weeb stuff recently so this might be sort of surprising to newer viewers but here we are. The first AI was endearing and so far the second AI is shaping up to get even crazier.

I went for the Japanese voicing again for consistency’s sake (we also voted for this with the first AI), but one of these days I’d like to try the English dub too. I get the Japanese voices is a big barrier for people who like to keep videos on in the background and also for those not normally into Japanese stuff. It would be nice if we could make the experience accessible to more people...!

Upcoming Stuff

I expect VTM: Swansong and The Quarry to finish up in the next two weeks, and for July releases I think I’m just looking at Stray.

I 100% remember I said I’d like to do a poll after HFW wraps up! However, in the past few months I’ve been doing the 3-games-simultaneously thing, and with my day job getting busier I really don’t feel it’s working out that well. (Frankly: it was more okay before b/c I was using some work time on YouTube stuff hahah.)

So my preliminary thinking is I will wrap up Swansong/The Quarry, go faster on Stray, then do the poll when I’m left with AI2. Hopefully this sounds good!

(This is also supposed to be struck out, damn you Patreon) We also hit 75k subscribers recently (whoa!!) and I’ve seen some small nudges for a Q&A – maybe a small one is feasible but I don’t wanna do another big one again so soon LOL. I will go and see about this!!

Thanks for your support as always, and do feel free to let me know any suggestions/comments below! 

Have a great July & summer,
Welonz