Thursday, March 27, 2025

Elysium Fire & Machine Vendetta

Elysium Fire continues Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies in Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space setting -- and Machine Vendetta ends them, for the time being, at least. The expected Melding Plague didn't show up yet so I'm thinking Reynolds might still visit the Panoply's continuing duty to defend democracy in the Glitter Band, even if Tom Dreyfus was implied to have exited stage left. But who knows.

Monday, March 10, 2025

Thymesia

Thymesia is one of the now-many third person soulslike action RPGs. It's from a small Taiwanese developer OverBorder Studio and turned out to have even lower production values than I had expected -- the game features no voiced dialogue in any language. However, even if modest in its scope, Thymesia was reasonably entertaining, its gameplay feel solid enough for a good time.

Sunday, March 9, 2025

Eversion

For whatever reason, Eversion by Alastair Reynolds was shelved among thriller/suspense books instead of the usual scifi I'd expect the author's novels to be found at. I'd say scifi section would've been perfectly fine in this case too.

Wednesday, February 26, 2025

Lichdom: Battlemage

Every now and then, some company makes one of these spell shooters. I reckon they were more common back in the simpler days, someone taking one of the shooter game engines and going: "What if instead of guns, you'd have magic?" The Wheel of Time (1999) coming up eventually on my backlog is perhaps one of such, although it used an existing IP. A more recent example would be Immortals of Aveum (2023). This post's topic, Lichdom: Battlemage by Xaviant Games, is from 2014.

Monday, February 24, 2025

Poseidon's Wake

Poseidon's Wake is the third and (currently) the final volume in Alastair Reynolds's Poseidon's Children series. There's another time skip forward, different members of the Akinya family taking the spotlight. The novel has interesting details and numerous story points to continue from but the plot drags in parts, the ending is unnecessary and forced, and character relations are painful to witness -- the book reminded me a lot of the author's 10 years older novel, Pushing Ice.

Thursday, February 13, 2025

The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition

The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition is largely just a bundling of the base game and its two story DLCs -- for which I bought it -- by the game's publisher, Private Division. The original developer, Obsidian Entertainment, had very little to do with it; the extra work there is, was done by Virtuous Games instead.

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

Everreach: Project Eden

Everreach: Project Eden definitely wasn't the most glorious start for this year's gaming -- and to be my 100th perfect game on Steam. Wishlisting and buying a title just because I saw a youtuber make a funny video about it, is probably not the wisest course of action, especially considering that Oboeshoesgames tends to play games of wildly varying quality. At least this one was really cheap, but even so, it is absolutely not worth one's time.