The Wheel of Time

My first encounter with The Wheel of Time, a 1999 first person spell shooter by now-defunct Legend Entertainment, was an article in some gaming magazine around the time of the game's release: I remember the article appreciating the ceiling architecture in the game. The book series is awesome but I had never gotten to play this oddball of an adaptation. It was not being sold anywhere for years but GOG managed to get it on their store in 2022 and I bought it last year, solely due to the license: I doubted a shooter from that era would be very satisfying gameplay-wise now.

Lust from Beyond

My backlog coincidentally offering next a fitting game for Halloween, it was time to play Lust from Beyond. I wasn't expecting a great experience: I bought the game mostly because I was already invested in the series. On the way to Beyond's release, Movie Games Lunarium put out two shorter, prelude type of deals: Lust from Beyond: Prologue and Lust from Beyond: Scarlet. (Despite being free, they both count towards your Steam achievement stats, curiously enough.)

Necromunda: Hired Gun

Necromunda is one of the spinoff games from Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 miniature wargame. Likewise played with miniatures, Necromunda is about small scale skirmishes between the gangs of the titular hive city/world that produces weapons and such for the Imperium's vast military forces. As a first person shooter, Necromunda: Hired Gun is a video game adaptation more of the Necromunda (sub-)setting than the actual tabletop game.

Steelrising

Almost exactly a year before Lies of P, there was Steelrising. In addition to both games being third person soulslike action RPGs, their settings are coincidentally very similar as well. Steelrising takes place in alternate Paris during the French Revolution, and like in Lies of P later, automats roam the streets, killing everyone.

Batora: Lost Haven

I suppose Batora: Lost Haven by Stormind Games had looked enough like Darksiders Genesis for me to buy it: a stylized top-down twin-stick hack and slash shooter. Visually the game didn't disappoint; I really liked the purple-orange dual color theme. Gameplay turned out to be pretty basic, however, and mechanics rather shallow. But the game's biggest problem is its writing.

The Entropy Centre

It had been a while since I last played an entirely new (for me) first person puzzle-platformer. While I had played a few in the past and we're not exactly lacking in these chamber-based Portal-without-portals games, they don't always look entertaining enough. The Entropy Centre by Stubby Games did, however. Its gimmick is rewinding objects backwards in time.

En Garde!

En Garde! (with an exclamation mark) had looked like one of the rare few gaming highlights of otherwise unexciting 2023 to me: a vibrant and lighthearted swashbuckler game. The actual experience turned out to be quite frustrating now that I got to actually play it. That was probably in part due to lack of skill when going for all achievements but I think that certain mechanics can be rage-inducing, even when trying to get through the game casually.

Scars Above

I feel video games wouldn't need to be so bound to having artificial gravity on spaceships. They're not restricted by real life, not filming real actors that need to be dropped down and up aboard a plane (or whatever technique they use) to float about. Of course, it might take some unusual work to animate characters (zero-g motion capture?), script scenes, and design ship interiors and movement for microgravity but it's been done before. I think it would add to immersion and you wouldn't need to increase the expected level of in-game technology to something so high. If humanity had the ability to create artificial gravity within ships, surely they would be able to send something bigger than a small, mere 4-person ship to greet a colossal alien object that has arrived to Earth's orbit like in Scars Above.

Drakensang: The River of Time

Drakensang: The River of Time is a prequel to Drakensang, released a year (in Germany) or two (North America) after the first game. As far as I could tell, the subtitle doesn't refer to anything specific (even though the locations are by a river): it's merely something characters say when speaking of the passing of time. The main story is less of a world-saving epic in this one; for the majority of the game I didn't even know what exactly the main quest was even going to be about.

All Systems Red

All Systems Red by Martha Wells is a science fiction novella, the first volume in The Murderbot Diaries. The book was sort of an impulse pick for me. I had heard the series was adapted into an Apple TV show, and thought I might check out what the books are about. The novella length surprised me, though: the hard covers could have held a full novel inside them but there turned out to be not that much text on the pages. And I suppose not that many pages either: 191 in the Finnish translation.