52 Games Challenge 2026!!!

[kashell]

57. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book - Bewildered Bird

I'm guessing there's a lot of extra content, so I'll just dub this the normal ending. Initially, I was not feeling this game. Especially after doing a fresh playthrough of Yoshi's Island. But, once my way of thinking shifted and I understood the game lacked urgency and had its own pace, I had a much better time. I would go as far to say it's better than Wooly World and Yoshi's Story. Some of the tasks necessary to fill in Mr. E's pages were ridiculous but they were few and far between. I really liked seeing creatures from Yoshi's Island getting their time in the sun and "learning" more about them. I was able to name the creatures and I, of course, went with a theme. The theme was "names of people I met in real life that I thought had goofy names." Time to continue filling in those pages!

[kamikazekeeg]

31 - Captured 2 (PC 2026) - BEAT - This was a nice sequel, where the first game feels kinda like any other indie horror game that you come across for like 5 bucks, this feels more like its own thing abit more.  You get a character to be, some story, it's not amazing, and I think they don't embrace it enough, but it's fine.  I think it slightly undercuts the gameplay as it felt like stuff was more obvious with this one than before, and there's abit more padding where you have like Backroom areas you have to do.  I both like and hate those, because they are just straight up the Backrooms, with one being the yellow ugly office rooms, another being a waterpark, etc...You can do kinda weird liminal stuff without just copying Backrooms stuff.

Entities were abit more improved, they are still silly and over the top, but they at least overall look better than the ones from the first game.  Overall, I liked it, it's nothing amazing, but I got both this and the first one for a 9 dollar bundle and I'm getting my monies worth out of it as an experience.  I'm gonna do Hard next which is the only other major difficulty and that'll probably be it.

[kashell]

58. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book - Moon

I have a few more things I need to collect before this is at 100%, but I saw the true ending and the credits roll. The variety in this game was through the roof even after finishing the first part of the game. Again, some of the discoveries took either too much effort, took too long, or had obtuse instructions. Still, it was an overall enjoyable experience and a great palette cleanser. It'll be tough going from this to something else - I have some heavy RPGs coming out soon and a few in my backlog I'd like to start before October (reserved for spooky games).