Games I Finished in 2023

Some say 2023 was a great year for games. For me, personally, I'd say it was above average. There was a handful of good (or at least good-seeming) games but nothing obviously superb -- and then few disappointing ones as well.

Middle-earth: Shadow of War

Middle-earth: Shadow of War built upon its predecessor Shadow of Mordor in various ways. However, despite all its additions, Shadow of War treads the same waters so much that I feel its main purpose was selling the same game again -- just with added microtransactions. Shadow of War's lootboxes were received so poorly that Monolith Productions/WB Games ended up removing them a year after the game's release while also retuning the epilogue chapter which players had criticized to be an extremely arduous grind when refusing to engage with the game's real money store.

Amnesia: The Bunker

Amnesia: Rebirth wasn't all that well received, as I recall. I had hoped otherwise after SOMA: it's possible that its brilliant writing was largely thanks to Mikael Hedberg who left Frictional Games after the fact. Epic gave away Rebirth at some point and it's still making its way up on my backlog. Frictional's next game, Amnesia: The Bunker appeared on Game Pass soon after its release -- better-received than Rebirth. I had thought to skip past the backlog to play Rebirth first but because the two games are not connected, I decided otherwise.

Jusant

Game Pass's 1€ trial returned in a nerfed manner: being only 2 weeks in length. Evidently that's not long enough for me to beat 2 short games and 1 bigger one (in a completionist style). I will have to return to finish the latter, Gotham Knights, some other time.

Dawnshard

Dawnshard is the second "novella" (56k words) in Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive, set between the series' third and fourth volumes. Its protagonist is tradesmaster Rysn Ftori who sets out on an expedition to Akinah, a lost city on an island shrouded in storms.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker

Owlcat Games have been better than Mundfish in their claim to be an international studio based in Cyprus, seemingly having avoided bigger controversies so far. The masquerade seems to be holding up even now with their newest game, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, which came out a couple of weeks ago. Russia has not really been mentioned in the headlines the game has made up to this point.

Exhalation

The 2016 science fiction film Arrival is based on Story of Your Life, a short story by American writer Ted Chiang, which I thought might be interesting to read because I recall finding the movie rather unimpressive. I probably should have read the blurb on Exhalation: Stories more carefully because the anthology doesn't include that particular story -- it's in another one. That didn't stop me from reading this one, though.

Echopraxia

In 2014, Peter Watts released Echopraxia, a continuation to his thought-provoking 2006 novel Blindsight. Echopraxia is a sidequel: it takes place largely concurrently with Blindsight. (And apparently Watts wrote a lot of it while surviving a flesh-eating disease on his leg!)

Roadside Picnic

Roadside Picnic (Пикник на обочине - Piknik na obochine) is a science fiction novel written by brothers Arkady (1925 – 1991) and Boris (1933 – 2012) Strugatsky in 1971. The book has been the source of inspiration for various works and been adapted onto various media over the years. One of its merits in influence is coining the loan word stalker in its specific meaning (which I've gone over in my Metro 2033 post) in the Russian language.

Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition

I picked up my paused Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition run again. Actually beating the game took longer than I recall it taking back in the day, though -- I could swear I used to get through it from start to finish over one weekend. Maybe due to not playing it for years I had forgotten the best routes to take for optimal time saving.

The Fractal Prince & The Causal Angel

Hannu Rajaniemi kept his heavy show-don't-tell style until the very end of his Quantum Thief trilogy. Only in the third novel I got a somewhat clear understanding of the factions and the recent history of the setting: how things came to be. The trilogy is certainly a wild ride all the way through. There's no stopping for strange words; you just keep reading and hope things will make sense at some point.

Control: AWE & The Foundation

Control Ultimate Edition was on Prime Gaming to claim, about two years ago now. I did just that (for free too with a trial, I think) because I wanted to play the game's downloadable content. I have to say that I was surprised how girthy both of the expansions were -- I had expected them to be maybe two hours at max each but instead they were several. I replayed the main game too -- and couldn't tell if anything was different (other than better performance on a more powerful GPU) -- because I didn't feel like figuring out if the game pass saves would work with the GOG version.

Metro 2034 & 2035

There are many years between the publications of Dmitry Glukhovsky's Metro novels. Metro 2033 was first released in 2002 (online -- printed in 2005), Metro 2034 in 2009, and finally Metro 2035 came out in 2015. With over a decade between the first and last, it's not terribly surprising there was a shift in direction -- especially with the final book -- Glukhovsky finding different things more important.

Tomb Raider: Underworld

Tomb Raider: Underworld was apparently developed concurrently with Anniversary, which led to the team on Underworld being understaffed. I don't think it shows too much in the game. Gameplay has few quirks but also advancements. And there is a good finale to the game.

Annihilation

I was interested to see if Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer was as much nonsense as its film adaptation. I've occasionally seen people mentioning they liked the movie even though it was a box office bomb. I suppose it was easier to start watching on Netflix than go to a theater to specifically see it. I found the movie pointless -- much like the novel now. They got that right.

Oathbringer

Like the second novel in The Stormlight Archive, took the third one too an enormously long time for me to get through. It didn't help that, unlike with the previous two, there was no 2-volume print of Oathbringer available: just holding a nearly 1300-page hardcover brick is unpleasant every time. It was mainly the content that made the book a struggle to read though.

Pushing Ice

Alastair Reynolds appears to be a fairly read author here based on the availability of his bibliography in the local libraries. And now looking at how many of his novels have been translated into Finnish -- it's about all of them! I thought that maybe I too should read more of his works (in addition to House of Suns) and picked off another of his standalone novels, Pushing Ice, which I read in English. I realized that Reynolds (being Welsh) writes in British English when a spacesuit's "torch" was used to light the way.

The Quantum Thief

In a chase for science fiction literature similar to the greatness of Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, Hannu Rajaniemi was one of the authors I have seen being recommended. I don't remember if that recommendation was in relation to hard scifi -- if so, I was mislead. I could have possibly made that assumption myself to based on Rajaniemi's background in math and physics. I wouldn't classify The Quantum Thief as hard scifi: the technology in its sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic, too far on the hypothetical spectrum.

Tomb Raider: Anniversary

Tomb Raider: Anniversary is a remake of the original, a decade older Tomb Raider (1996). Essentially, Anniversary recreates the original in a newer engine with expanded environments and tells its story in a more comprehensible manner that was also altered to fit the following events of Tomb Raider: Legend. In Anniversary, Lara is hired by a rich businesswoman Jacqueline Natla to find an artifact called Scion of Atlantis.

Tomb Raider: Legend

The classic Tomb Raider games made by Core Design between 1996 and 2003 are too old for me to play now. They look terribly blocky and are no doubt extremely clunky to play: unapproachable for someone who didn't experience them back in the day. But I was interested to play the subsequent Legend trilogy (2006 -- 2008) which was developed the same Crystal Dynamics as most of the newest reboot ones.

Metro 2033

After reading Metro 2033 (Метро 2033) by Dmitry Glukhovsky, it should come as no surprise that it has a video game adaptation. The novel's post-apocalyptic world is practically created for it: the remnants of Moscow's population surviving in the city's Metro network, away from the surface's post-war toxicity and other -- sometimes supernatural -- dangers that tend to seep into the underground too. Of course, the dark Metro also holds the usual hell: other people.

Redfall

At the end of my Dishonored: Death of the Outsider post 4 years ago, I was speculating the direction Arkane Studios would be going. Arkane Lyon's Deathloop was still an unknown at that time and I was afraid that it would be some easy-to-monetize multiplayer cash grab. While that game turned out to have a player-invasion mechanic, it is still very much a singleplayer title. Deathloop had been in development way before Prey's sales were realized; it probably wasn't pressured by the latter's reception. Instead, I should have been worried about the next title from Arkane Austin. I wonder if Arkane's parent company Zenimax Media had laid down the terms after Prey: the next title would need to make more money -- all the money. Raphaël Colantonio probably said no thanks and peaced out to found Wolfeye Studios (he also worked briefly on Ken Levine's upcoming Judas) and Harvey Smith came from Lyon to take control of Austin's reins.

Everspace 2

Everspace 2 (or EVERSPACE 2 as it's stylized) was on my list of most anticipated game releases of this year. I loved the first game: space combat is not a genre I usually play nor like but Everspace was a big exception. And so I hoped this second one would be more of that. Many rejoiced when Rockfish Games decided to abandon the roguelike structure of the first game and make this sequel to have the more usual static locations. I wasn't so sure that would be for the better, and as it turned out, it and other design decisions resulted in Everspace 2 being a stretched and tedious, 100-hour treasure hunt for a completionist like me.

Atomic Heart

I wonder what is it with Cyprus in particular that makes it a desirable place for Russian game developers to allegedly start operating from, but both Owlcat Games and Mundfish have opened an office there: to hide their nationality that is currently very unpopular in Europe, and maybe to have an easier time with transferring finances with the sanctions and whatnot. I doubt that either company have actually moved an entire studio's worth of personnel to another country -- I think some sort of "façade office" scenario is more likely.

Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy

The second game I played while waiting for Atomic Heart to get patches, was Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy. Like Crystal Dynamics before, was Eidos-Montréal too tasked by their (now past) overlord Square Enix to make a game set in Marvel's comic book universe. I think the poor reception of Marvel's Avengers earlier hurt this game's initial sales, people being hesitant to jump into a possibly similar mess even if this one is solely a single player game. The general consensus on Guardians is positive but I personally found it a fairly tedious, sometimes even painful, of an experience.

Shadow Warrior 3

While waiting for Atomic Heart to gets its inevitable first post-release patches before starting it, I played through a couple of other titles on the PC game pass. The first one was Shadow Warrior 3, a first person shooter which was released a year ago. It's the third game in the series ever since it was rebooted in 2013, Flying Wild Hog as the developer. (The original Shadow Warrior was released in 1997.)

Far Cry Primal

The amount of interesting games on Ubisoft+ was getting pretty low, even nonexistent. But because I still had two whole weeks of the cheap month left, I had to dig up something. I ended up on Far Cry Primal.

Assassin's Creed Valhalla: Post-Release Content Updates

Ubisoft+ subscription was again 1€ for a month and it was time for me to return to Assassin's Creed Valhalla, which had finally gotten the last of its story updates at the end of last year. And there sure was a whole lot of content added in the two years the game was actively supported post launch. In total, Valhalla got three paid expansions and about five free additions that could be considered as separate bigger features. I was finished with the full game at 270 hours played.

Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition

I beat the original campaign of Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition at the end of 2021 already but only earlier this year finally returned to do the expansion, Heart of Winter, as well. I've always done the expansion just before beating the main game but this time I decided to do it differently and import my characters to the expansion after defeating Belhifet. That wasn't as smooth of a process as I wanted, and while I did get it sorted out, something else came up and the playthrough went on a hiatus.

Alamut

I thought to actually read the novel Assassin's Creed was inspired by after having learned about it last year. The book, Alamut by Slovenian Vladimir Bartol (1903 – 1967), turned out to have a Finnish translation (by Kari Klemelä). The covers had some background information like how the novel was mostly forgotten during Bartol's lifetime but was found again and became more widely known after the September 11 attacks.

Last Argument of Kings

Unlike with the names of the previous two novels in The First Law trilogy, this last one's origin I was familiar beforehand: There's a roguelike in development called Ultima Ratio Regum -- Last Argument of Kings -- which are the words King Louis XIV had had cast on his armies' cannons. The novel's title is again maybe somewhat relevant to its plot but I feel it's again mostly there just because it's cool.