Week of 01 May 2022
“Screw you, umbrella.”
Achievements Earned In:
- Backbone
- A Winter's Daydream
- The Wild at Heart
- Super Weekend Mode
Back in October, I was doing my test of all the new games added to Game Pass when I loaded up Backbone, a noir adventure tale about awful, unhappy people with…tails. It’s essentially Chinatown with a Beastars overlay. You play as a raccoon solving the murder of a client that takes him into the seedy underbelly of a dystopian version of Vancouver, and oddly the game even keeps calling these anthropomorphic animals “people”. What really interested me was the lack of info on how to complete the game, but it had guides on Steam and those are always fun to complete because the TrueAchievement ratios are large for no reason! Even worse, at the point I started this game everyone had just copied the (sparse) info from Steam to the achievements on the site. But, hey, seemed easy enough, and was also a Cloud game, so I started it Sunday. I did my first playthrough by bouncing between the Steam info and TA list to kinda gauge when I needed to keep an eye out for particular achievements. I quickly realized some of the glitches with the list were going to actually affect me (which usually doesn’t happen), but deleting your save and going through again for them solves the issue. The problem lies in that when you play and, say, introduce yourself with a name other than “Howard Lotor”, when you go for the achievement to only introduce yourself as such the game saves the choices you made previously and locks you out of that achievement. But, again, deleting your save fixes the issue and you can get that and other conflicting achievements without much trouble. Making this even less of a problem is that once you know what you’re doing you can blow through the extremely depressing storyline in about an hour or less.
A major issue soon reared its ugly head, though, as by the final playthrough I needed for everything else I still hadn’t unlocked the achievement for learning about all the books in the game, even though I’d done the known prerequisites every time. I tried EVERYTHING, from doing it offline, doing it on a second profile, doing it in different ways, resetting my Xbox…nothing worked. I even reached out to the publisher and, while they’re “aware of the issue”, they don’t have a solution. The absolute last thing I can think of trying is attempting the achievement on an older console, but since I’m still not home I don’t have access to my Xbox Ones so it’ll have to wait. I’m really, really concerned this is going to become a permanent issue since the developer has already moved to working on a new game and the publisher is seemingly no help. But I’m going to keep bugging them and trying different methods to get this achievement. My brain won’t let me give up!
Achievements unlocked: 25 (+25) | Completion: 96%
Okay, okay, I’m sorry. “Hentai is art”, my bad.
Still stretched out A Winter's Daydream throughout the week as I tried to get Backbone completed. Just to add to my frustration when I got to the end of the game and the final achievement was supposed to pop…nothing happened. Like, what the heck was Xbox’s problem this week?! My final achievement didn’t pop and I had to play through the whole game again. This is a very short game so mashing the A-button got me there Friday and luckily the achievement popped. Whew…
Achievements unlocked: 10 (+4) | Completed
Girl, you don’t need any MORE vinegar…
I actually started my next game this week amongst the issues, and I went with The Wild at Heart since it’s leaving Game Pass soon. I’ve wanted to play it for a while because it’s apparently essentially Pikmin…but even though this game is right up my alley, I just couldn’t get some concrete time to sit and play. Combined with my focus on TRYING to get Backbone completed, I just didn’t really play beyond the initial achievement. I’m going to try and really get into this ASAP.
Achievements unlocked: 1 (+1) | Completion: 3%
With the last easy game done, and with little time to spare Saturday evening after getting home, I needed a quick and easy game to blow through. Decided to go with Super Weekend Mode, which is apparently a vertical shoot-’em-up thing. This is one of those Ratalaika Games titles that can be completed in around 10 minute or less, so easily enough I unlocked all the achievements and went back to giving that glitched achievement another go. Many more of these following in the coming weeks!
Achievements unlocked: 11 (+11) | Completed
Highest ratio: 4.02
True connection (Backbone)
Lowest ratio: 1.00 (tie)
Frozen tears (A Winter’s Daydream)
Act 1 (Backbone)
Two hearts beating (A Winter’s Daydream)
Credits (A Winter’s Daydream)
The Adventure Begins (The Wild at Heart)
