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.

Revenger

Revenger by Alastair Reynolds was not marketed as young adult fiction but I guess it's the young protagonist and the straightforward space opera story that led it to get classified as such, the book even winning the 2017 Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book. A praise quote on the back cover from SFX claims the novel to be the most enjoyable of Reynolds's books. I'm not sure if that's quite true -- especially now with almost another full decade of books from the author in the mix -- but Revenger is definitely from the top end.

A Mighty Woman With a Torch - The Vibes of Wolfenstein

I think it was maybe earlier this year when I happened to stumble upon the Wikipedia article about The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus, a sonnet that is cast onto a bronze plaque mounted inside the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. So that's the significance of Wolfenstein II's subtitle, I then learned: the New Colossus is the Statue of Liberty! I had been so unaware.

Mein Leben - The Infamous 'Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus' Achievement

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus had been sitting in my Steam library imperfect for good many years. One reason for that was missing the DLC. Bethesda's pricing policy had made the Deluxe Edition cheaper than the Season Pass -- it felt stupid to pay for the base game "again" for the DLC. But eventually I did do just that. The other reason -- and why I had 49/50 on the non-DLC achievements -- was 'Mein Leben'. I was saving it for last because I predicted it would be the hardest one to unlock. And damn if I was right.