Just two quick little game reviews before the end of the year, and then that’s it! That’s all the games I completed this year!

The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog

Steam/Windows

Well, I certainly didn’t expect The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog to make me CRY. It’s got to do with the motivation of the final enemy, so I won’t spoil it. TMoStH was really fun all the way through. While finding clues was really straightforward, the character writing was top notch and sold the whole thing to be honest. I don’t know a whole lot about the Sonic stable of characters. I’ve only poured hundreds of hours into Sonic Adventure 2: Battle and Sonic Advance, so there were a few characters here that I had no prior introduction to at all. That said, they were still a delight, everyone was so fleshed out and unique and written so well that I felt like I knew them anyway. Very impressive for what is essentially a fan game! The little runner minigames, the “think” levels as your character put together the clues, were a nice change of pace too, kept things from feeling too point and clicky stale. This game is free on Steam. Definitely check it out, even if you aren’t super into Sonic.

Moonlighter

Linux, Mac, Windows, PS4, Xbox One, Switch, iOS, Stadia (lol), Android

Oh.. Okay so, initially I super fell into the gameplay loop of Moonlighter, it definitely scratched an itch I had over the summer. But then I fell out of it just as quickly. I picked it back up a few days ago and apparently I had left off at the final dungeon? Goofy.

The shop gameplay make a nice contrast to the dungeon crawling, monster bashing, item collecting gameplay. But after a while I found myself making a million dollars per shop day and it just felt kinda pointless to open up my shop all that often anymore. The dungeon gameplay also gets really repetitive after three (that’s why I set it down) or four dungeons.

The game saved all of its exposition for the final boss. Literally everything felt like it out was out of left field. I won’t spoil it, but.. come on. That really took me out of it. So much that I did not play the DLC at all.

I thought it was a cute touch though that the game recognized it was Christmastime and decorated the town in Christmas stuff. I miss the days when old DOS games would do that, or Sonic Adventure, or Phantasy Star Online. I know most modern MMOs probably do, but it was really cute to see the tileset in an old, purely offline game change with the seasons. This reminded me of that :)

I dunno, check it out of it’s on sale?