A few things have happened:

Firstly, I decided to reformat my initial post for this blog. The list of "Reviewed games" is now sorted in alphabetical order, rather than by the review date. This way, it's easier to find my "reviews" of specific games, I guess. Whereas if you want to read my posts in chronological order, well, you can just follow the thread and read the posts as they appear, in chronological order... This was inspired by Matt's (aka Cock's) blog. And done using Unix commands. I'm just too smart to manually sort text data, yes.

This was inspired by Matt's (aka Cock's) blog.

Secondly, I've also looked at Tiamat's itch.io Extravaganza blog, and was inspired to also play some games from the Racial Justice / Palestine Aid bundles. I wasn't even aware that HowLongToBeat had a special page for these games!

Tiamat's itch.io Extravaganza blog

https://howlongtobeat.com/itch

A few games from that list stand out: the games which have only a few completions, but are rated 10/10. Sometimes, it's literally just 1 person completing the game and rating it as 10/10 (probably the developer...) But some of them might be hidden gems! I missed out on *Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass*, that one seems genuinely interesting.

*Masks*

https://samplereality.itch.io/masks

What is this game?

You’re a courier for the resistance, trapped on a university campus under siege. The environment around you is coming apart, fast.

dafsdfadsf

Made for subQjam 2019, where works are limited to 1000 words and the overall theme is "environment." Inspired by the 2019 protests in Hong Kong and decades of students protests before that.

Is it worth playing?

Well, the 1000 word limit is interesting, and definitely inspired creativity, but I would not call the game a 10/10 masterpiece. The game is only 8 minutes long, so saying literally anything feels like a spoiler. I'll just say, it is good at conveying a sense of terror. But still, for an 8-minute-long game to be a 10/10, it would have to be a work of pure genius, and Masks falls short of that. *7/10* - if you have nothing to do for the next 10 minutes then go for it, but don't expect it to blow your mind.

(if you want some real good 10-minute horror, go play some of Yames' games. *Discover My Body* is extremely good.)

Yames' games

Discover My Body

Playing it on Linux, or low-spec hardware?

It's a text-based browser game. You can even play it on a mobile browser, apparently. Not much to say here.