Atlas Fallen: Reign of Sand

Atlas Fallen was released in August last year to a lukewarm reception. Exactly one year later, it got a big update that came with the subtitle Reign of Sand. And a month later from that, the game arrived on Game Pass, giving me a chance to play this cool-looking yet not that well received title from Deck13.

Stop hiding in the lockers of Alien: Isolation

I've been going to write another post about Alien: Isolation for a while. Considering the game just had its 10th anniversary and a sequel was announced by the original game director Alistair Hope at Creative Assembly, now is the perfect time. The year I first played the game, I didn't place Isolation even in the top tier on my annual round-up post but the game has since then become one of my all time favorites with numerous playthroughs. The frustration a first run often comes with is gone on revisits: nothing will pull you away from the marvelous immersion of this scifi horror experience.

Absolution Gap

Absolution Gap is a direct sequel to Redemption Ark in Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space. It has some amazingly imaginative elements and the story seemed to get truly wild after it got going. But it didn't last until the end: central characters were written off in lame ways and the narrative fizzled out. Multiverse stuff gets worse in Gap: always too convenient a tool to explain stuff -- anything can happen.

Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn

Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn released in July without making much of a splash. In my opinion, Flintlock is at least an improvement from A44's previous game, Ashen, already for the fact that it has a lot more variation in combat actions. There are some questionable design decisions and I suppose overall it's not that special of a game. However, I would say it's enjoyable enough on Game Pass if you're hungering for a straightforward soulslike action roleplaying game.

Horizon Zero Dawn

Of all the past decade's many PlayStation exclusives, Horizon Zero Dawn, a vibrant third person action-adventure game, was the one I wanted to play the most -- well, until replaced by the slightly more recent God of War (2018). Unfortunately Zero Dawn failed to meet my expectations spectacularly. By now, the game's first release was over 7 years ago, so the game is pretty old, but I didn't expect it to feel so much worse than Tomb Raider (2013), which I had just been replaying for its multiplayer achievements. General movement is considerably slower, mantling less universal.

Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days & Galactic North

With some exceptions, it doesn't matter that much when you read the novella/short story collections of Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days and Galactic North in relation to the rest of Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space series -- at least to the Inhibitor Sequence: I have not yet started on the Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies. However, I would say the best place to read them is probably after Revelation Space and Chasm City, before Redemption Ark, with the exception of the eponymous Galactic North story which I would leave after Absolution Gap. It might hit the same when read right before that novel too.

Days Gone

Sony's exclusive first-party console games from the late 2010s started making their way to PC at the turn of the decade. Days Gone was not the first of them but it was the first to make it onto my backlog. The game's reception was lukewarm and maybe that's why Sony declined the pitch for a sequel by Bend Studio. Overall Days Gone is an extremely solid production; its weakness lies in its plot premise and writing. The game does however cast a delicious sequel hook at the end, and people who've gotten that far do seem to want to see where a second game would go.