Welcome to the final Monthly Summary of 2023 here at gamergal.exe! The past few months have flown by and I’ve been trying my best to finish off the games I started earlier in the year despite having very little free time over the festive period. I’ve been doing these posts every month for the past few years now and I plan to continue this trend throughout next year – but hopefully with a new edition as I start my new venture.
Gaming has been a big part of my life over the past decade, but my main passion still resides within music and I’ve been wanting to record my own covers for a long time now… and 2024 is the year to start! It’s still early days, but I’m hoping to post one cover per month on YouTube and spend a lot more time going back to my roots and enjoy creating music again. Obviously I’m not going to stop gaming, but I think there will be a lot less of it next year as I divide my time into my other interests.
But before we look forward to a new year, let’s take a look at December’s progress!
Completions:
Virche Evermore ~Error Salvation~
The Divine Speaker: A Bounty Hunter’s First Christmas
Hi-Fi RUSH
This completions list is sending the year off with a bang with some of my favourite titles of the year! Virche Evermore ~Error Salvation~ has been my favourite of the whole year and a game I won’t be forgetting any time soon thanks to its incredible storytelling. I loved how it wasn’t afraid to include dark themes, and having bad endings as part of the story progression was an interesting twist before unlocking the “good” endings. The last route (Le Salut) was so well written and I was on the edge of my seat throughout – I really didn’t want it to end! Next, the wait was over to play The Divine Speaker: A Bounty Hunter’s First Christmas when it finally released on Steam last week. This Christmas chapter was released exclusively for Patreon subscribers last year and I’ve been dying to play it ever since as I’m a huge fan of the first game. It’s about what you would expect from a DLC bonus chapter, but I enjoyed revisiting the franchise. The last completion of 2023 is Hi-Fi RUSH which I finished this afternoon. There were many things I loved about this game, but it also had a fair few niggles that made it very frustrating at times. The games shows masses of creativity and is fun from the get-go, but unfortunately, the pacing killed the whole flow of the game and we were still getting tutorial lessons halfway through. Despite its flaws, I would still recommend checking it out!
Games Played:
Kingdom Two Crowns
PlateUp!
I didn’t play much else this month aside from the games I completed. I put another 15 hours into Kingdom Two Crowns with WesleyWhale, but after becoming super frustrated with how unfair the progression was and having to start over again multiple times, we decided to stop wasting our time. I would’ve liked to see the end, and maybe we will sometime in the future, but the game was way too repetitive and stopped being fun after such a huge grind. We also gave the PlateUp!‘s Christmas update a go which was actually an interesting experience as we’ve never gotten far enough to fully witness automation. I appreciate how the devs update this content regularly and include new seasonal events to mix up the gameplay. To be honest though, I don’t think I’ll ever get bored of PlateUp!
Purchases:
The Divine Speaker: A Bounty Hunter’s First Christmas
Monster Prom
Witchtastic
Considering the Steam Winter Sale is on and I’ve had my eye on a few titles, I’ve managed to restrain. I did buy The Divine Speaker: A Bounty Hunter’s First Christmas as soon as it released since I’ve been waiting for it for a long time, which I then played straight away. The other games were gifted as part of a huge co-op bundle (I’m not going to list all the games), with the main two I have my eye on being Monster Prom and Witchtastic.
Blog:
I finally managed to finish my HORRORWE’EN 2023 post which features several horror themed games that I played for Hallowe’en. Since I posted 2022’s post back in October, 2023’s post was a little delayed… I also wrote an impromptu End of Year Gaming Tag post after seeing the tag circling around WordPress. I used to enjoy writing these tag posts back in my early blogging days, so this was actually a lot of fun to write. I was hoping to get a couple more posts out which unfortunately didn’t go to plan, but there’s always next year!
Other:
Although I didn’t spend much time gaming, I did do quite a bit of other stuff this month. I read a handful of good manga volumes including The Business Proposal vol.3, How I Met My Soulmate vol.1 (my new favourite!), My Summer of You vol.3 and A Sign of Affection vol.7. I watched a bunch of films for the first time in forever as WesleyWhale decided to gift me a load of Christmas related Blu-rays including Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, The Thing (1982) and (my favourite Christmas film ever) Gremlins. I also went to the cinema to see The Boy and the Heron last night. Considering how highly it was rated in Japan, I was expecting it to be better than it was, but I’m glad I went to see it. Album wise, I only bought 2 this month: Adoć®ęć£ć¦ćæćć¢ć«ćć (Ado’s Utaite Album) by Ado, and RA:ONLY 2 by Raon, both of which I have listened to excessively over the past few weeks. I was considering booking tickets to see Ado in London in March, but since it’s still quite a journey for me and mid-week, it was going to cost a small fortune… In the end, I decided not to, and I’m still pretty gutted about it, but it’s just not really do-able.
Music:
First up this month is SCRAP BOOOO by ē§å±±é»č² (Akiyama Kiro), one of my all time favourite artists. As expected, this song is super catchy with plenty going on and I’ve really enjoyed listening to this song this month.
Next up is an acoustic cover of ćććć®ććć (Ikimonogakari)’s ćć«ć¼ćć¼ć (Blue Bird) by ćććć (Arekun). Arekun is one of my favourite acoustic cover artists and I’ve followed him for years. His last cover was posted 8 months ago and I’ve really missed them, so this song was a great surprise and I love the new video layout too! I haven’t heard Blue Bird in a while either.
I can’t let December pass without a Christmas Song. Last up is a cover of back number‘s ćÆćŖć¹ćć¹ć½ć³ć° (Christmas Song) by ęå®® äŗ® (Narimiya Ryo), previously known as ćŖććć¼ (Naryo). Again, I’ve followed his channel for many years and I feel like he’s a highly underrated artist as I really enjoy listening to both his covers and original songs too.
I’ve also been playing/practicing this song myself as I was hoping it was going to be my first upload on my YouTube channel. Unfortunately, I ran out of time to get it finished after stumbling upon some unexpected hurdles, but it’s been a great learning experience as a practice song, and I’m looking forward to trying again in the new year! It probably won’t be this song though as Christmas will be long gone by then…
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