Week of 15 Jun 2025
“I’d rather pay you than shoot you.”
Achievements Earned In:
- Keplerth
- Unknown 9: Awakening
- Journey to the Savage Planet: Employee of the Month Edition
There wasn’t a whole lot of Keplerth left to do, and good thing as it was leaving the Game Pass library at the end of day on Sunday. First was locating and activating 50 Meco Portals, and I stuck to the overworld for that one. With my pet and follower along, I could just mount up and cut through the map in a grid pattern to cover the most ground, undistracted, and get this done. It didn’t take as long as I expected and I apparently had a large number of human cities (each always containing a portal) to the West of my base. Next was something a lot more… stationary: fishing. The final dishes I needed were all the seafood ones, each requiring three of a different fish. I camped outside the fantastically named (by me) CIty 1 and fished away until I had all I needed. Didn’t take super long, but super boring. Then it was just taming time, so I used a seed from TA to find the rare leopard I had to catch for one achievement, then I needed fifty total tamings to finish up. The problem is one of the ingredients needed to craft the collars, leather, is rather hard to come by without a functioning farm of cows. So… instead I used my new portal network to travel around bestowing death upon every Herdsman’s shop I had come across and reaped their cows. No one seems to care, so it’s okay, right? Didn’t take long and I had plenty of collars to get the final achievement and bid farewell to my time on Keplerth.
Achievements unlocked: 58 (+4) | Completed
Continuing my quest to play games from 2024 I don’t feel got a fair chance from the gaming community, this month’s entry was Unknown 9: Awakening. I remember seeing the trailers and liking the vibe, and later clips seemed functional enough. It’s an action-adventure where you play as Haroona, a “Quaestor”, that can use the Fold to fight the Ascendants and protect the world from Seshin. There’s a lot of lore, and the developers meant for this to be a huge transmedia experience. Sadly, the game flopped hard so all this fleshed out narrative won’t go further (for now). It’s a shame, because by the end of my time with the game I was enjoying myself. I’m not sure the story was engaging enough, but all the Fold powers (such as a “Force” push/pull and body swapping) is a fun time. The levels are quite linear with minimal exploration for collectibles and upgrades. But, hey, sometimes it’s nice to not play a tens-of-hours open world experience and instead a nice and concise AA-game. The huge issue I have with the game, though, is the graphics. They’re… bad. I’m not one to need 4K textures to enjoy a completion or see the value in the art, but even on a Series S the animations look bad (poor Anya Chalotra, how they massacred my boy) and everything has this pixelated fog about it. Haroona’s model is the worst, with the actor looking cracked out all the time, wide-eyed and unemotional. It’s downright distracting. Achievement-wise, it’s the usual for this kind of game: get kills with various abilities, level up the skill tree, find the collectibles… stuff like that. An easy and fun completion overall!
Achievements unlocked: 38 (+38) | Completed
Definitely looks okay in stills.
Enough time passed after beating Keplerth that then the new batch leaving Game Pass was announced. A major one I’ve wanted to make sure I got to was Journey to the Savage Planet: Employee of the Month Edition. I really enjoyed playing the original back in 2020 with Shawn1991, and was happy to just play through it again! It’s not hard, it’s short, and just scratches an itch. The way the world opens up as you play just works so well, always leading you to the next area or discovery. Things get a little hectic in the final area, but by then you should have the visor upgrades that highlight the various collectibles to keep you going. And this time I played with the kiddo, who had fun but mostly enjoyed sitting in the ship and watching the silly ads the game plays. I finished my first run (of probably three) a minute before midnight, which is my cutoff every week. Fun as always! Can’t imagine I’ll be playing much longer. Wish I had time to do the Windows stack.
Also, kind of a shame this 5yo game looks leagues better than Unknown 9…
Achievements unlocked: 39 (+39) | Completion: 76%
This was quite a beast!
