Games I Played in June 2025
2025 July 09So before getting into the games I have more thoughts on, I'm lying a bit with this post. I've played some more E2:E this month, but my thoughts haven't changed much so I don't feel like including it again, at least not yet. Additionally, if you checked my Backloggd, you'd know there are games I started in June but don't mention here. That's because I want to play more of them before writing up my thoughts.
You know, the kind of exceptions that just intuitively make sense for posts like these. But I didn't lay out any rules for myself in May, so I'm half-mentioning them now.
Rules are silly anyways.
Unicorn Overlord
If you remember my post about "Do It for 5 Minutes," it may please you to know that I finally beat this only a couple days before that post went up. Why is that relevant? Because I had been playing since December.
Despite my erratic play schedule, I had a great time with Unicorn Overlord. I remember when it was first coming out, a number of people seemed unimpressed with the story. I think assuming you know every twist within the first 10 minutes of a 60 hour game is a bit silly, but the last Vanillaware game was 13 Sentinels so it makes sense people were looking for a strong narrative experience. Unicorn's story is certainly not on that level, but again it's quite silly to assume its story would receive the same amount of attention as a game that was 50% (if not more) Visual Novel. The story that is here is serviceable, I'd even call it good for a couple regions. I do think there are a couple sour notes near the end, but they don't get in the way of my enjoyment.
Now the real substance of the game lies in its gameplay. And that gameplay includes optimizing units to Albion and back. Every unit is composed of 2-5 characters (You could make a 1 character unit, but you normally won't be), where every character has up to 4 equipment slots of varying types, as well as active and passive skills that you can re-order and change the conditions when they activate. Even only having a single option for every character's class (which I mostly consider positive regardless of this game's genre — Here's an excellent blog post that mostly matches my opinions on job/class systems in RPGS), there is a ton of room to organize units in whichever way you choose. The last bit of seasoning of the unit building system is marking the leader of each one. The choice between faster movement or having access to a healing or damage assist came up surprisingly often in my playthrough, especially after reaching the point where time of day affected battles.
If there is one aspect of the game I find lacking, it would be it's overworld exploration. The map is pretty and that's great since every battle stage also uses the overworld map. But the actual activities you can do on the map are pretty dull. We have: rebuilding towns to open up shops and automatically collect materials, doing a mining minigame to unlock secret treasure maps and collect materials, small (and I mean small) character cutscenes to earn a tiny bit of rapport and collect materials, and of course, manually collecting materials. It's not too bad, I was never annoyed by it, but it really does feel like a system that only exists to support itself, rather than fully interact with other parts of the game.
But hey, there's a reason I stuck with the game for 6 months. It's a fun time. It's gameplay is mostly unique (Do I need to add Ogre Battle to the backlog??), and the characters are at least as developed as the typical 3DS Fire Emblem unit. I even did every quest I came across. Would you really want to be catching chickens and milking goats in a game if you didn't enjoy it?
Hue
At the start of the month, the "oldest" game on my Backloggd (the first game I added when I joined the site in March '24 and still hadn't played) was Hue. And I figured why not give it a shot. It was... a simple puzzle platformer.
If you are made tired of the philosophy 101 "Is my color red different than your color red," then you will probably not like this game's story. The good and bad news is that the story mainly exists in long hallways separate from the actual puzzles. And really, the puzzles are what you're here for. The game's central mechanic is choosing one of the currently unlocked colors to make objects of that color disappear into the background. I was worried the game couldn't do much with that one idea, and I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong. There were a couple moments that stumped me when having to juggle objects of different colors. I still would have liked to do more in the game, but of course that would require new sets of puzzles as well, and the game seems content with its approximate 4 hour runtime.
I do have a couple complaints. I played this on Steam and if you do so as well, I recommend just playing with keyboard and mouse controls. Controller support required changing a setting and even after doing so my jump input was inconsistent, which is a death sentence in a platformer. My biggest gameplay complaint is that the game, despite its short length, does not respect your time. What I mean is that the movement is quite slow, and if you have to restart a room for any reason, you really do have to restart the whole room. It's not awful, but I found myself getting annoyed if I made a small mistake and had to repeat large sections of certain rooms.
Hue's not a bad game, but it is a simple one. If you want a relaxing puzzle game rather than a highly-complex one, it's a good pick for a night or two.
Dino Sort
Squeezed this one in right at the end of the month. I'm not sure if the game is getting updates past 1.1, but if it does know that 1.1 is what I played. It's a very cute game. All the dinosaurs having little crying faces if they're not in the right place is such a fun detail. Almost as fun as the level clear animation which you should see for yourself by at least playing the first level.
The puzzles are quick little brain-scratchers. They're more complex than a simple sliding tile puzzle, but played similarly. Silverhand on Backloggd had the first review of it on that site. They described it as "a very do-y puzzle game," and I'd have to agree. Don't worry too much about how to solve the puzzle because you'll make good progress in each one just by trying what feels right. It's also not too long, I played through the whole thing one morning before going to an afternoon shift at work, and it was a great way to start that day.