What Video Game Did I Play Yesterday?

Scented Strawberry Shortcake Puzzle (500 piece, Wildbrain)

May 13th, 2025

Yesterday, I did some catch up in my 100 games in 100 days quest, getting me to 39 games in 39 days. I achieved this by digging away in the itch.io incremental/clicker game mines. In Little Dig Game, I sacrificed many virtual lives to this dig. It was very enjoyable, though, with a more cohesive mix of story and gameplay mechanics than I expected, some solid jokes, and a satisfying, surprisingly tense ending. It was probably the best clicker game I've ever played, and well worth the hour or so it took to play it. I didn't expect anything as good as Little Dig Game was out of yesterday.

That's not to sell the other games I played yesterday short, though! Dreamcore95.exe was stylish, with some interesting stacking item generation mechanics, and a relaxing gameplay arc. I zoned out for an hour or so after work with this, and it was kind of what I'd needed that night.

Coffee Drinker was simple, but funny, and was the only thing I played yesterday with a prestige/restart-with-bonuses mechanic. It made me feel like I'm not really doing enough to escalate my own caffeine habits, but it's okay to stay modest in my goals.

Idle Farm Tiny was the shortest and simplest of yesterday's clickers, but that was fine! I got to cut the heck out of some wheat, and it was fun.

Past that, I did do some before bed Switch gaming. I tried Armed 7 DX in my quest to decide what shmup I'll focus on next, but the aiming mechanic was kind of driving me up the wall. There's a lot to like about it, so I don't think that's a dealbreaker, but I need to come to grips with how to both move my mech and aim its gun. Probably, turning it on before 1am is going to help a ton with this.

I played Baking Time a little to unwind, too. It was a nice capper on a day of numbers going up.

Offline, I did work a little more on the Strawberry Shortcake puzzle I complained about yesterday, and my feelings about it did not include. The flimsy pieces were really bothering me, and by the time I noticed there was no variety to the piece shapes, I'd had it. I considered keeping this going, but instead, I boxed it all back up and put it on the shelf. Maybe I'll try it again later, but I don't want to deal with it right now.

May 12th, 2025

I had some family stuff going on yesterday, but also had a lot more time to hang out and do nothing that I expected. It maybe wasn't an amazing choice, but I used it to really focus in on Randomax, a shooter I'd bought and tried on Steam a while back. The random weapon mechanic is fun, so I wanted to zoom in on it anyway, but once I got an easy mode one credit clear pretty early on in the day, I decided it wouldn't be too hard to get a normal mode 1CC. It is a pretty easy game, so my confidence wasn't misplaced. It was 2 am by the time I got it, though! I was proud of being able to pull it off in just a few hours play, but it was maybe a little silly to stay up that late making anime girls shoot a wife variety of colorful missles (and also bees and balloons) at each other. Still, I had a good time! I just have to decide what shmup comes next!

Other than that, I (almost) finished my Doritos puzzle yesterday. It was missing a piece, which was very dissatisfying, but the quality overall was so janky that I wasn't so shocked. It was still fun, too, so I just stuck a post-it on the box that a piece was missing and popped it back on my shelf.

After that, though, I started a Strawberry Shortcake puzzle that's so much worse! The pieces are really flimsy and grainy feeling, and the image itself looks very dingy. It was the same price as the Doritos puzzle, so maybe the lesson is that five dollar puzzles just kind of suck.