What Video Game Did I Play Yesterday?

Late Shift(Switch)

August 29th, 2022

I was mildly helpful and productive yesterday, but still found some time to fritter away on games. My biggest chunks of game time for the day were spent on Late Shift, another FMV game I bought cheap on Switch. It's from the 2010s, and it's interesting to see how far production values and filmmaking skill have come since Double Switch, which I was playing last weekend. There's not nearly as much gameplay here, though, with the game opting instead to turn a British crime thriller into a choose-your-own adventure story. I did two 90 minute playthroughs yesterday, swapping out the whole center of the game and getting two mildly different endings. The setup for replay is really rough, though! There's no chapter selects or scene skips, so you have to sit through the whole 90 minutes every time you want to go for a different ending.

In the two playthroughs I did, I saw every scene aside from the endings but one, so I was really tempted to call the game cleared as is. Both endings I got were so bad, though, that it really bothered me leaving it as is without trying to "fix" things. I need at least a few days before I see if I can get a "good" ending, though, so I'm letting this be for now. (I also might cheat and use an ending guide, because watching this 7 times is bad enough without guesswork.)

Before bed, I cleared another set of puzzles in Mahjong Stories: Vampire Romance. I hit an unclearable puzzle, where the developers had put an odd number of tiles in the stage layout, making a full set of pairs totally impossible. They even left the last tile standing blank! I hit the "skip" button to go past it, but it still left me frustrated. I'm too close to the end of this mess to quit now, though.