The Claw of the Conciliator & The Sword of the Lictor

On the post for The Shadow of the Torturer, I seem to have thought that The Book of the New Sun was a trilogy. But it is in fact a tetralogy (that Gene Wolfe had written only to the level of a draft before the first volume's publication, not to full completion) with an additional fifth volume that acts as a coda. I'm not sure how the details got mushed for me. I'm also quite uncertain what the "as a coda" means -- kind of hoping it's 'not important' because the libraries here don't seem to have the fifth book.

Dolmen

I'm not willing to play every single, somewhat interesting-looking, third person soulslike action roleplaying game ever made -- not quite. There is a bar of quality and production value the games has to pass. But... the bar is pretty low: Dolmen passed it. It was developed by a small Brazilian team called Massive Work Studio -- who have disbanded now, I believe.

Inhibitor Phase

Had I read Absolution Gap right when it came out in 2003, it would have been a long 18-year-wait to see if Nevil Clavain's last wish would lead to anything like I suspected. But because I read Gap just last year, I only had to wait until now that I got to reading Inhibitor Phase (which was published in 2021).

Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood

There is untapped potential in video games utilizing the many tabletop roleplaying games under the World of Darkness series. There actually exists quite a few titles using one of the licenses -- Vampire: The Masquerade being easily the most popular -- but they're largely not very high profile ones: interactive fiction games, visual novels, VR games, etc. Another truly remarkable, single-player roleplaying experience on the level of Bloodlines is yet to be made. Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood is not that either.

Ball Lightning

Ball Lightning (球状闪电 - Qiúzhuàng shǎndiàn) by Liu Cixin is a hard science fiction novel that loosely leads up to the author's later Three-Body Problem trilogy. Liu apparently wrote Ball Lightning while thinking he was about to die to liver cancer he was misdiagnosed with. That kind of explains the heavily philosophical prologue and I suppose the book's ending, which I didn't like all that much due to it leaning so much on metaphysical quantum nonsense.

Avowed

Avowed is the first game from Obsidian Entertainment under Microsoft that was of interest to me -- Grounded and Pentiment were not that. I expected the same kind of mediocrity The Outer Worlds was made of and pretty much got that. Avowed is a professional production that feels smooth and fun to play but at the same time is limited in scope and ultimately a shallow experience.

Red Rising

Red Rising by Pierce Brown is another book that I've seen being recommended. It and its sequels are available here in libraries so I decided to check out the first one. I didn't look any more to what kind of books they were but the quote on the cover from Scott Sigler told me exactly what was I about to read: "Ender, Katniss, and now Darrow."