Ok I guess let's try to get part three of three of the far too many games I've played recently checked off the list. These ones are the ones I enjoyed the most. Not necessarily the best games, whatever that even means, but I had the most fun with them or got the most out of them.
Cow Life Sim RPG: I don't even remember how I stumbled across this one, but I impulsively grabbed it because it was unusual enough to pass my "I'd buy that for a dollar" filter. There's simultaneously not a lot to it beyond variations on numbers go up but also so many absurd ways to combine the various features of the game in silly ways. As someone who's extremely tired of increasingly realistic graphics in games, the zero-budget-drawn-in-paint art style was super refreshing to me. And it easily won me over like 15 minutes in when I was overrun with pride flag pigeons asking me what even is gender. I glitched at least one side quest that I think locked me out of some stuff and couldn't figure out what to do with one of the others on the Steam Deck, but I had a good enough time with most of the rest.
Cursorblade: Fairly small and short for the sort of game it is, but that keeps it from getting stale. Swiping at things with the mouse cursor instead of the usual moving the character with keyboard keys or an analog stick makes it feel different enough to stand out, and the cute art style helps too.
Vengeful Heart: This one is a replay of one of my favorite things I've played in the past few years and was in the top section of that year's end of year post, so it'll be disqualified this year, but it's still great. There's already stuff I've said on here about it that should show up in the tag, but the short version is it's still one of the modern things I've seen that does the best job nailing the PC-98 visual style, the characters and way they play off each other are all great, and it has much better politics than most stuff like this and integrates those positions into the story very effectively. Super looking forward to whenever they finally finish their next game, Crystal in Carnations.
Bad End Theater: Easily my favorite of the three (I think?) things I've played from NomnomNami. It's such a great idea to take a very short and simple story with only a handful of characters and then let you throw different tropes at it and see how it plays out differently. I thought the progression of it was pretty satisfying, and it's exactly the length it needs to be to explore its premise. The true final ending is also just the right kind of ridiculous too. My only real minor complaint is that the actual really true final ending is a bit weaker and detracted from the rest of it slightly for me. Like the idea's fine, but the way it was executed didn't fully land for me. Aside from that it was a very enjoyable couple of hours.
And with that, I think I'm finally caught up. I really need to figure out what's making me sick and fix my computer soon, because last year's end of year post ended up being like 7500 words even though I mostly stuck to a single sentence for each game, and I've played nearly as many this year (if I remember right I made it to 183 last year, and this year I think I'm at 177 with a couple weeks to go). Not looking forward to trying to write and format that much text on my phone if I don't have to.
