Well friends, I completed my January game challenge…but just barely. I’m not proud of that, but I feel I should be honest.

The month got away from me, and I ended up beating three of the games in the last two days of the month. Whew! The last, I finished in the 11th hour. Literally. I finished it at 11:26 pm on the 31st. It was a far closer call than I would have liked.

I never finished Alan Wake. I’m still working on it. I will certainly finish it this month. That’s not a promise, just a feeling I have.

I did end up playing through Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and I was a little disappointed. I had quite liked MW2, but this one fell flat for me. I felt like the game was at a specific level of intensity for the duration and never let up or offered any dynamic experiences. I am a believer that you can’t have the highs without the lows, and this just started at a Michael Bay level and plateaued from there. I also thought it looked weirdly washed out. I played with the settings just to see if I could get it to look any better and nope. A whole lot of washed out intensity.

I finally dug back in to the Wolf Among Us after having left it at the first episode. I adored the art direction (I wouldn’t mind an art book for this), but I found the game experience wanting. The last episode especially.

I am never one who loves quick time events, and the last episode was dripping with them. I suppose they wouldn’t have been quite as bad had it not been for the chugging nature of the game in general. I had the game digitally installed on my PS3, however it took forever for new scenes to load, and the game itself struggled to run appropriately. The audio track would skip and stutter. When even the intro scene struggles to play each time, that’s not a good sign.

And while the game would surely have benefited from a technically smoother experience, the overall game itself just didn’t grab me as I’d hoped. Was it beautiful to look at? Indeed. Was I in love with the game? No.

It did have an awesome character representation of Bloody Mary, and that’s honestly what stuck out for me from the last episode.

To round out the fifth slot of the month, I finally played through Gone Home. (moderate spoilers)

I knew something occurred in the attic at the conclusion, however based on my formulations, I was expecting something very different from what I got. I suppose because of those preconceptions I was a bit let down, but then, that’s my own fault.

I also had an intensely frustrating experience with the game itself, though this was likely the fault of my laptop’s lack of video game processing power and little else. Any time I would try to look around, the game would chug and wheeze, and it took me far longer to play due to this than I would have liked.

Though, small victory, this was the first game I played on a computer in many, many years, and for that, I feel super happy! I finally got to put that wired controller I got for Christmas to good use.

So the games for the month were:

1.12.15   Resogun (PS Vita)
1.12.15   P.T.
1.30.15   Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
1.31.15   The Wolf Among Us
1.31.15   Gone Home

I look forward to filling everyone in on my February game challenge. Thank you to those of you who took up the challenge with me. Please let me know in the comments how you fared!