Tag: Gaming

Pokémon Go-odbye

26 July 2025 / Sinead

After 9 years of playing Pokémon Go at varying intensities, it is now Pokémon gone (the pun is obvious, but I had to take it!). While I enjoyed the game a lot during its early years, over time its frustrating or overly-monetised aspects overtook its enjoyable ones enough that playing it no longer made much sense.

Writing out my thoughts on deleting the game made me think more about “forever games”, and how weird it is that you can now measure the active life of major games beyond just “years” and instead into “meaningful fractions of a person’s lifespan”. I do wonder how that time-maths affects people’s decisions about what games they choose to keep playing, and whether it allows games to hold on to players through the sunk-cost-fallacy or through inertia to a greater extent than in the past.

But for now, here are more words than I expected about my many years playing PoGo, and about deciding to stop playing it.

Starting Out

When I started writing this post, it was a couple of days after the 9th anniversary of PoGo’s release. Although I first opened the game, and so technically started playing, on day one, the only device I could use was my Nexus 7, which did not have working location access. So I couldn’t actually catch any Pokemon until I revived a spare rooted Android phone about two weeks later. (That’s just reminded me of how much I liked the Nokia Lumia I’d had at the time, and that the main reason I stopped rooting my phones was because Niantic started barring rooted devices from PoGo).

My delayed real introduction to the game had one advantage; because I hadn’t been able to catch any of the default starters on day one, I had seen the secret starter Pikachu spawn. Once I could play, I was able to choose Pikachu as my starter.

Mini-Reviews | May 2025 Demos

30 June 2025 / Sinead

Spilled! (PC, Steam)

Spilled! is a very small game about making the world a nicer place. You pilot a boat, armed with a water cannon and a big scoop, through polluted, oil-filled water to clean up the gunk, sweep all of the debris away, and rescue stuck animals. Returning the mess and debris to a recyling centre gives you coins which you can then spend on upgrades for the boat, such as faster speed, a larger holding tank, or an even bigger scoop.

It aims to be relaxing, rather than intensely fun – the reward for cleaning up each area is seeing the formerly brown and murky waters returning to beautiful blue ones teeming with coral, tropical fish and plants, and rescuing its creatures from being trapped in muck, rather than acheivements or loud fanfares.

The controls are simple: RB/RT to accelerate, LB/LT to slow down, B to stop, and the left stick to turn. (Just note that the turning is relative to the screen, not the boat, so holding the stick left will make the boat turn towards the left of the screen regardless of direction). The water cannon and magnetic scoop are assigned to the face buttons, which the settings menu describes as “button north/south/east/west” – I’m not sure if this is a programming/translation efficiency thing, or just a quirk, but either way I quite liked it.

The UI is also very minimal, as the small size of each sub-area, and the choice to have a recycling center and upgrade stations in each sub-area, means that information such as your coin count and the number of coins needed for upgrades can be stored on these buildings and not require any HUD space. The instructions are wordless, which I often dislike, but it this case it is done well – the pictures and icons used are very clear, as are the video prompts that show how to activate an upgrade station when you drive into it.

The pixel-art graphics are very pleasant and detailed in the environments I saw during the demo, and they demonstrate the relaxing nature of the game well. The gentle piano-led soundtrack also supports this. While I wasn’t the biggest fan of the “slurp” noise of sucking up the oil from the water, that’s just my dysfunctional ears – the sound does work well in the conext of the game. (It can also be turned off separately from the music.).

When I finished the demo section after about 20 minutes, the ending screen said that there was “about 45 minutes of game left after this point”. Spilled! is made by one developer, Lente, with another person assisting with graphics, and its clear that they are aiming to share a small but finished and polished game, rather than overpromising and having to compromise.

Am I buying this one? Yes. £4.49 for what will be an enjoyable 1-1.5 hours, and which supports the indie-est kind of indie dev, is a fair trade for me. Spilled! is a definite recommend if you like games such as Unpacking or Powerwash Simulator. As a bonus, 10 cents from every sale goes to a whale and dolphin conservation charity.

Mini-Reviews | April 2025 Demos

1 June 2025 / Sinead

Potions: A Curious Tale (Xbox)

Potions: A Curious Tale is an adventure game with a focus on crafting, and a “wits over weapons” approach to combat. This is conveyed clearly from the first interaction with an enemy, which lets you stumble into the right thing to do in a way that feels surprisingly natural. Similarly, the plot is explained through dialogue rather than explicit instruction or popups, but in a non-annoying and quite natural-feeling way.

As protagonist Luna, your aim is to develop your witching skills and potion reportoire by learning from your Granny, the towns potion master. During my play time, the majority of missions could be boiled down to problem-solving via fetch quests and exploring new areas to find ingredients for crafting a large variety of potions. The crafting system is based on blending different amounts of earth, air, water, and fire ingredients, which gives enough structure that you can start experimenting with combinations straight away. Some missions also include combat encounters, which are intended to be managed by using the environment (and even other enemies) to your advantage, rather than by just throwing potions everywhere.

One of my favourite parts of the game was its art style, which is aesthetically pleasant and calming but not boring. Each area has a distinct colour palette, collectibles, and cast of enemies. There are also some graphical quality-of-life features, such as ingredients being highlighted in purple during conversations and some interactable objects being highlighted in yellow. While there are no maps for individual areas, the visual clues provided are fairly easy to understand: for example, paths that lead back to the main map have a different appearance to the regular paths in that area. Also, once you have navigated to a deeper area of a zone, you can then choose to go back to that area. E.g. on reaching the Deep Dark Forest, you can choose to enter at the 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th sub-area. This cuts down the backtracking needed for longer quests without removing the locations entirely.

Technological Overthinking #4 | Alternatives to a typical gaming headset

20 April 2024 / Sinead

This is a companion to my more general post about alternatives to headsets, as I wanted to write about both the options available for people and about my own experience and the solution that worked for my particular preferences and caveats. Splitting the two aspects into two posts seemed like a better option than creating a giant wall of text.

Due to everything on the limitations/caveats list below, finding a comfortable communication option for gaming is quite tricky for me. Given that gaming is my main way of socialising, a faulty choice here can be very annoying. This meant that taking the time to dive into researching more options was worthwhile, especially if it resulted in a more comfortable gaming-party experience.

I’m aware that this is irrational, and that it’s very much a first world problem, but trying to find a working alternative to wearing a typical headset was annoying not only because I had to try (and return) a lot of audio products, but because I felt stupid for not being able to just do things in the “proper” way.

Limitations / Caveats

I’m very sensitive to noise; the “immersion” of hearing all of the background noise and detail inside the game that people often desire can instead feel like a sensory overload for me because there are so many sounds going on.

Filtering out chat audio from the background of game audio is also tricky for me, so I need to have the option to hear only chat audio.

Sometimes, direct audio from earbuds/ headphones can feel physically painful even at very low volumes, so I need to have the option to send all audio (game and chat) out from the TV.
I get headaches from wearing most headphones for longer than an hour. The only exception to this to this I’ve found is the Bose QC 35ii because of how light they are and how little force they apply. Wearing headphones or a headset can also put uncomfortable pressure on my ears and jaw when my TMJ is playing up.
Lots of earphones and IEMs just don’t fit my ears.
I need to wear either earplugs or my noise-cancelling headphones for a large part of the day when I’m at work, and would prefer not to have to shove more things in/on my ears when I’m at home.
I’m not very good at talking loudly, so I need an actual mic rather than an inline mic to be audible to my friends.

Anti-Caveats (aka factors I don’t need to worry about)

I live with someone who is severely hearing impaired, and my neighbours are hearing impaired too, so being overheard or disturbing others is not something I have to think about.
I have an old flatscreen TV with surprisingly high-quality speakers: both game audio and music sound good and don’t have that scratchy “laptop speaker” sound. This means a complex setup with recievers/ surround-sound speakers isn’t necessary, as hearing party and game audio through my TV is actually my preferred option.

Help! I’m a gamer who can’t* wear a headset

19 April 2024 / Sinead

Now that gaming is such a known and celebrated part of the world, and has stopped being portrayed as a negative hobby, aspects of it have become standardised and locked in as essential parts of the activity. Across media, adverts, videos, and streams, gaming now has an expected portrayal with standard steps. You boot up your console or your PC “setup”, covering your aesthetically arranged desk in an RGB glow, settle into a comfy chair, put on your outside-world-blocking headset, and get immersed in another reality.

When you have to do any of those parts differently to that stereotyped (and marketed) pattern, it does kind of feel like you’re doing it wrongly.

* By “can’t wear”, I don’t mean that wearing a headset is completely impossible. It’s more that, due to a combination of hearing/audio processing issues and sensory oddities, wearing headsets or earphones is often very uncomfortable. Listening to game audio and chat audio simultaneously through headphones – achieving the “immersed” type of experience that is portrayed as the ideal and default way to game – is not the way gaming works for me. As a result I’ve spent a lot of time looking for ways to have an audio setup that means sociable gaming can just work for me.

Now that I’ve tried a lot of different options and finally found one that works for me, it makes sense for me to write down the types of alternative options and their general pros and cons to hopefully help anyone in the same boat. (I’ve spun off my specifc limitations/caveats, and the options that did and didn’t work for me, into its own post).

Alternatives to a typical headset.

Review | The Finals

6 February 2024 / Sinead

In the year 2100, the world’s most popular sport happens virtually rather than physically. Competitors don VR headsets to enter matches of The Finals, fighting for both money and the attention of the show’s many sponsors, whose gifts of merchandise act as badges of honour.

This premise sounded pretty interesting, generic name aside, so I tried The Finals out on a whim after hearing positive comments on its gameplay from friends, knowing very little beyond that it was an FPS. It didn’t get off to the best start because the first thing I saw after installing and launching the game was a “create an account” screen. (If I did reviews out of 10, games with mandatory account requirements would automatically lose at least half a point!).

Once reluctantly logged in, however, I was impressed by the surprisingly effective tutorial. The tutorial included a shooting range with distance markers, vertical structures to practice traversal, and droppable items to practice changing the environment. There were also both hostile and friendly training dummies so that players could try out using healing items and creating cover for allies as well as fighting, reinforcing the team-based aim.

During the tutorial I experienced an interesting visual glitch where my gun became detached from the rest of my character, making it impossible for me to change weapons or interact with objects. However, this turned out to be the only bug I encountered: The Finals provided remarkably (by 2024 standards) stable and bug-free gameplay. Unfortunately, that’s one of the few compliments I can provide, because despite its mechanical and functional quality, the game did not click at all for me.

Mini-Review Collection – Demo Edition

1 February 2023 / Sinead

During the last couple of months, I’ve been trying to get out of my “only playing Destiny 2” rut. Exploring the demos section of the Xbox store seemed like a good place to start, as I knew I would be likely to find something that I wouldn’t have thought of searching for.

I tried a mixture of games; these four games are the ones I played and thought about enough to write a fair review for.

Ghostunner – 3.8 GB
Klonoa: Phantasy Reverie Series – 3.5 GB
Button City – 840 MB
Dead Pets Unleashed – 2.5 GB

Ghostrunner

During the opening cutscene, your character is betrayed and brutally attacked. Then you awaken, having been repaired by an AI who then tells you that you need to release them from prison. So far, so cyberpunk. However, while the story presented in the first level seems a little generic, the gameplay is the star of this show.

The Ghostrunner demo contains the first two levels of the game, which show off three main gameplay types. One type is pure traversal; using your Ghostrunner abilities of sliding, grappling, jumping, wall-running and air-dashing to fluidly travel across the city. The second type is combat sections, which are closer to being puzzles than typical fights. Enemies die in one hit, but so do you. So the combat sections are about using your parkour skills to zip to each enemy in turn before they can see and lock on to you, deliver the killing blow, then zip over to the next enemy, in as seamless a chain of movement as possible. The best comparison I can make is that it’s like a hybrid of Mirror’s Edge and Superhot, without being a copy of either game.

During the combat sections, you will die a lot. However, the game is designed with that quick trial-and-error loop in mind – checkpoints are frequent, death has no obvious consequences, and you respawn very quickly – so combat doesn’t get too frustrating. (There is also an upgrade system, and an assist mode, in the full game, but neither of these were present in the demo, which I think was a misstep).

Review | Beasts of Maravilla Island

25 November 2022 / Sinead

After completing the first level, I felt that Beasts of Maravilla Island was fairly good yet not particularly memorable. But then I saw the second level. Its celestial blue-and-purple colour scheme, dotted with glowing plants and vibrant creatures, absolutely delivered on the feeling of awe and wonder that Maravilla aimed to create. For me, that environment took the game straight from ok to good, and guaranteed my interest in both finishing the game and writing a review of it.

Beasts of Maravilla Island is a third-person snapshooter where you control Marina, a wildlife photographer. Marina has grown up listening to her grandfather’s stories of Maravilla Island, a magical-seeming place where he was once shipwrecked. Now, armed with his camera and his detailed journal, she is visiting the area to see if her grandfather’s stories are true, and to share them with the world if they are true.

During the introductory custscene, Marina is on a ship to the island, and at the start of the game she mentions that she will be picked up the next day. This makes clear to players that the adventure will be fairly short, but more importantly, it sets the tone for the rest of the game by making clear upfront that Marina is not lost, abandoned, or in danger.

After landing on the shore, the first main area, the jungle, is just a short walk away. The Singing Jungle is a vibrant and tropical area filled with colourful birds, gemstone-themed beetles, and climbable vines. This area introduces the player to all of the necessary mechanics; moving, taking photos, picking up objects to solve puzzles, checking the book of stored photos, and checking the journal for clues about the creatures.

The second area, which really caught my attention, is the Glimmering River, a night-time zone with waterfalls, glowing rivers and crystal caves. Here, there is a little more interaction with the focal creature, including a charming game of fetch, plus puzzles that gently build on the ones players solved in the first level.

The final level – the Painted Plateau – contrasts with the previous two, as areas of withered grass and barren rocks suggest that trouble has come to the peaceful world. Desert-based plants and creatures like cacti, lizards, and birds of prey prevail here. Bonus points for Maravilla here for being possibly the only game I’ve ever played with spiders that aren’t scary at all.

Insomnia 69 Gaming Festival

4 September 2022 / Sinead

Last weekend, I was finally able to return to the Insomnia Gaming Festival, which I last attended in 2019. Given just how much had happened in the interim, I was curious about whether the festival would be how I remembered it, or whether it would have been forced to take a new form.

Friday

The first thing I noticed was about Insomnia was that the event seemed smaller this year. We arrived at the entrance hall only a few minutes before the 10:30am start time yet were still near the front of the line. Similarly, while we had previously queued in front of a large stage, this time we were presented with a corridor made of barriers and a single screen that played the same 2-minute intro video for the entire weekend. While the usual staples of playable games, tabletop games, merch stands and exhibitors were all present, there were less of them than in 2019. In fact, Friday was much quieter than I expected.

Initially, some of our group were disappointed by the smaller scale and lack of upcoming games or AAA games, given that at previous shows we had been able to play games like Marvel’s Spider-Man and The Division 2 before they were released. I wasn’t particularly annoyed, as the main reason why I go to Insomnia is to spend time with friends who I only physically see at Insomnia, but I definitely hadn’t found the festival as impressive as I had found it in 2018 or 2019. Fortunately, the Pub Quiz later provided some context that assuaged my worries and changed my view of the weekend.

Review | Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands

10 April 2022 / Sinead

I can often take months (or years…) to complete game campaigns, so finishing a campaign just 10 days after a game’s launch may actually be a speed record for me!

While I have played most of the Borderlands series, I’ve never played the Assault on Dragon’s Keep DLC for Borderlands 2 that inspired Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. So I had limited knowledge of what I was in for, beyond that the usual staples of humour, loot, and eccentric randomly-generated-guns would receive a tabletop twist.

This guess was correct, but I found that Wonderlands was a larger, denser, and even funnier game than I was expecting. Unfortuately, it was also a buggier game than I was expecting. But let’s talk about what Wonderlands is aiming for first, before going into specifics.

The context of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is that people inside the Borderlands universe play a tabletop game named ‘Bunkers & Badasses’. After travellers Valentine, Frette, and the Newbie crash their spaceship into a mountain, Tina lets the stragglers rest in her house until they’re rescued… but only if they play ‘Bunkers & Badasses’ with her.

The gameplay of Wonderlands takes place inside that round of ‘Bunkers & Badasses’. You play as the Newbie, who is controlling the main character of the ‘Bunkers & Badasses’ match, while Tina is the bunker master in control of the story, and Valentine and Frette act as the Newbie’s advisors. This structure gives the game chance to experiment with the usual Borderlands style and gameplay, while also leaving lots of room for messing with the fourth wall and packing the game with an even wider range of references and shout-outs than usual. So far I’ve found side-quests that reference media as far apart as The Secret of Monkey Island, The Smurfs, and Don Quixote.