PC Game Pass Exploration: April Edition

Posted on April 26, 2023 by Aywren

Life is Strange True Colors. Return to Monkey Island. Coffee Talk 2.

One of my goals for the past few months was to spend some time playing PC Game Pass games in order to get what I feel is my money’s worth from the subscription. I’m waffling on whether to keep it or not, to be honest. I love the service, I just have so many Steam games in my backlog – especially since I’ve splurged on bundles this year when I shouldn’t have. I should be focusing on those instead.

Right now, though, I’m holding on to the subscription because I want to finish Coffee Talk 2 in particular.

Anyhow, while I did play some Game Pass every week, I played Monkey Island for two weeks trying to get into it. So that’s why there’s only three games here rather than four.

Life is Strange True Colors

This has been on my to-play list for quite a while. I’ve never played any of the previous games (which I probably should to enjoy this one the most), and I’ve heard it’s a good series.

What prompted me to pick it up was that it was leaving Game Pass at the beginning of the month, which was a bummer. I put a few hours into the game and did enjoy what I played, but I knew I wasn’t going to be able to finish it within the time I had. So, I ended up putting it down and not pushing it.

I also think I need to try the previous games in the series – I do own the first episode on Steam, which I’ve not touched yet. I might come back around to this game eventually if I find myself hooked by the first game.

Return to Monkey Island

Monkey Island is one of those absolute classics in the adventure point-and-click world. But I’ve never played any of the games. Maybe that’s what colored this one for me – it seemed to hold on to a lot of the nostalgia factor for returning players.

Don’t get me wrong. It did try to quickly summarize the adventures, stories and characters for a new player, too. I didn’t feel all that lost with the game, but I certainly wasn’t as invested as a long-time player of the series would have been in revisiting the characters introduced.

While I enjoyed a lot about this game, it just didn’t hook me. And I tried playing it two different times to see if it was just me being meh about it.

I don’t mind a slow burn game. But in the end, this game felt like it was giving me a laundry list of things to try to figure out how to do without really moving the story forward at all. I wandered around the town for far too long, revisiting places, talking to characters over and over again, and still made very little progress – even using the hint book.

So, in the end, after a few hours of not feeling like I was getting anywhere closer to sailing off for actual adventure, I put it down. I was sad about this because I really did want to try a Monkey Island adventure.

Coffee Talk 2

I played through and finished the original Coffee Talk on Switch, so I knew I wanted to jump into the sequel when it dropped. I was pleased to see it was going to be on Game Pass, too.

I started this up this week, and played through the first day (the game is kindly broken up into chunks of time, which actually helps me make progress). I can already see that I’m going to likely enjoy this one as much as I did the first one.

I figure most of my Game Pass time next month is going to be around playing through Coffee Talk 2, so I’m thinking about taking a break from making Game Pass a monthly goal. I’d rather put some focus on the unplayed bundle games I have on Steam instead.

So that’s what I’m going to do!

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