Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II

I have had the impression that Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II isn't regarded as high as its predecessor. Critics didn't seem to like this sequel -- not that the first one got high scores either. Initially I thought The Force Unleashed II to be a clear improvement: visual clarity had improved and gameplay felt quicker and more responsive. But I suspected the problems would become apparent later.

Permafrost (& Neuromancer revisited)

I came upon Permafrost, an Alastair Reynolds novella at one of the local libraries, and ended up reading it right then and there -- being a novella it's not a long read. Its theme didn't turn out to be the greatest -- has there ever been a good time travel story? Permafrost also uses first person perspective, which is atypical for Reynolds.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

Some time last year, I decided to buy the seemingly well regarded STAR WARS: The Force Unleashed games, having never played them. Many recognized Sam Witwer in Days Gone and The Callisto Protocol (Captain Ferris) from knowing him previously as Starkiller in these two games. The first one is from 2008 (2009 on PC) so I wasn't expecting the smoothest experience -- older action games tend to have rough edges when it comes to gameplay.

The Prefect (Aurora Rising)

And back to the Revelation Space again...

The Prefect is not a continuation to the Inhibitor Sequence, however, instead taking its reader back in time -- assuming they've been going through the series in publication order -- to Yellowstone in its golden age, before the Melding Plague. The novel's name was later changed to Aurora Rising but that didn't make it to the translated print I read.

Othercide

I bought Othercide, developed by Lightbulb Crew, purely for its aesthetics -- a decision I came to regret. I think at the time I wishlisted the game, I still fancied the noir visuals: the grayscale with one or two colors. But now I no longer find it as attractive.

Blue Remembered Earth

For a change, I read an Alastair Reynolds novel not set in the Revelation Space universe: Blue Remembered Earth is the first of his Poseidon's Children books. The setting has humanity still confined to the Solar System but I don't see why it couldn't be in the same universe, just earlier in time. The title started to sound ominous to me as it seemed Earth was just fine in the book. I was expecting something apocalyptic to happen.

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 all the way until to 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.

Authority & Acceptance

Sort of morbid curiosity led me to read the rest of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy -- and apparently a fourth book, Absolution, is already forthcoming. It puzzles me quite a bit that there's demand for this kind of unrewarding literature that offers mystery without answers. I didn't find the books compelling at all; everything is so meaningless when anything can happen, consequences don't matter.

Lords of the Fallen (2023)

The 2023 reboot of Lords of the Fallen dropped its definite article eventually and instead one has to use the release year to distinguish the titles -- which might actually be clearer. The developer studio CI Games had founded to make the game also ended up being called Hexworks instead of the initially announced 'Defiant Games' for whatever reason.

Redemption Ark

I can say now that Chasm City is definitely preferable to be read before Redemption Ark: a key character from the former novel appears in the latter and he will mean very little to you otherwise. In fact, one should read most of the short stories in the Galactic North anthology beforehand as well -- which I hadn't done. I was quite annoyed when Redemption Ark was referring to the events in them.

Still Wakes the Deep

Ah, dammit, here we go again: yet another first person horror walking simulator with a cool title but not much else to give. Such a great name, though -- Still Wakes the Deep. It evokes the same feelings as the names of the couple of Vernor Vinge's novels I've read, that use of 'deep' as a noun. I also love how one can read the title in two ways: the deep waking yet again or the deep waking unmoving. In the game you can find a poem where title seems to have originated from -- unknown if it was written for the game or if it existed before the fact.

The Callisto Protocol

The times certainly were apt for a spiritual successor to Dead Space: EA had pretty much abandoned the into-a-dead-end-written series -- and horror games don't bring in the big bucks, anyway. The field was -- or at least had seemed to be -- open wide, but in the end Striking Distance Studios had to hurry to get The Callisto Protocol out in time: in-2021-announced Dead Space remake threatened to steal their thunder.

New Spring

I had completely forgotten about New Spring until I happened to come across it in the local library recently. New Spring is the prequel novel to the epic fantasy series, The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. It was originally published as a novella just before The Path of Daggers but Jordan later lengthened the novella to a full-size book which was released after Crossroads of Twilight. Despite that it's not even half the size of the usual Wheel of Time novel.

Evil West

Like Shadow Warrior 3, which I already played, was Evil West also a 2022 release from Flying Wild Hog. Evil West is a similar experience too: straightforward, linear entertainment.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning

THQ Nordic had at some point acquired the rights to the third person action roleplaying game Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning from EA and commissioned Kaiko to remaster it. (Kaiko had previously put together the Darksiders Warmastered Edition.) The remaster, Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning, was released in 2020 and came with all its old downloadable content, which include two expansions I had never bought nor played. Kaiko also set out to develop a whole new expansion for the game: Fatesworn, which came out in 2021.

Chasm City

People further than me into Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space series say Chasm City is readable at any point: it's a standalone prequel that deepens the setting without being integral to the overarching plot. I was going to adhere to that advice and ignore the novel until later but then the back cover of Redemption Ark's Finnish translation advertised it as the "third book in the series". I thought I might as well read Chasm City first and then continue with Ark.

Hellpoint

I was certain Hellpoint was from a Russian studio. I guess its aesthetic brought to mind eurojank from Eastern Europe. To my surprise, Cradle Games, the developer of this third person soulslike action roleplaying game, is instead based in Québec, Canada. GOG gave away the game for free at some point but I also bought its Blue Sun DLC because I like my games whole.

Maid of Sker

I really should stop buying/playing these lower budget horror walking simulators. I guess I'm hoping to find another Soma-like gem somewhere: small chance of that ever happening. At least I didn't spend money on Maid of Sker specifically as it was on the same Humble Choice I bought for Deathloop.

Deathloop

Deathloop (stylized with quotations and in caps as "DEATHLOOP") garnered a lot of confusion on its way to release. Somehow the game's premise appeared to be hard to grasp -- at least for some vocal percentage. Every new trailer or news article about the game had more than one person asking what it actually was. The reveal of the player invasion mechanic only added to the confusion -- it was as if people had never heard of such a thing in FromSoftware's games for instance.

A Deepness in the Sky

A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge is a loose prequel to his earlier novel A Fire Upon the Deep. It features the previously-introduced character Pham Nuwen when he was still living his actual life. He's far from being the sole viewpoint in the story, though. After the prologue he's barely even mentioned until he eventually floats into the spotlight.

Borderlands 3

I seem to have started my previous Borderlands posts with how I got each game in question. So I guess to continue with the tradition: Borderlands 3 Ultimate Edition had quite the discount back in 2022 on Steam. It was a pricing error, in fact, and lasted a whole day before it was fixed. And to this day, the complete version doesn't seem to have been as cheap on any official store. That is always nice to note when you finally get to a game on your backlog: you didn't "pay extra" just for it to wait there.

Elderborn

Elderborn (stylized in caps as ELDERBORN) is a first person action game by a Polish studio Hyperstrange. The developer advertises the game as a metal AF (action fantasy) slasher -- a good analogue would be Doom (2016) but instead of guns, you get blades and hammers. Elderborn is very much an indie title in scope; a playthrough shouldn't take more than 5 hours. But it is a fun 5 hours; Hyperstrange did absolutely nail the gameplay.

Ashen

Annapurna Interactive has published quite a few games that have this certain style of simplistic 3D visuals with low polygon count/sparse details. Such looks communicate low stress gameplay -- at least to me -- but that can be deceiving. Ashen, a 2018 soulslike action roleplaying game by A44, for one, can be a truly frustrating experience.

Amnesia: Rebirth

It's a rare occasion for me to play an Epic freebie but free is about the most I would pay for Amnesia: Rebirth. I knew beforehand I wouldn't like the game; I played it mostly because it was free and because I had then added it onto my backlog before The Bunker came out. It was only with the latter game's release I learned that the lead writer Mikael Hedberg had left Frictional Games after Soma. Rebirth's story was thus unlikely to be any good and the Amnesia series' gameplay is yet to impress me.

Assassin's Creed Unity

I remember Assassin's Creed Unity being mired in technical issues at release. One vivid memory is of character face textures not loading but eyes and mouth still being there -- the stuff of nightmares. I think in general people didn't like the game back then but the perception of Unity seems to have curiously turned around: you see a lot of positive comments these days. Playing it now for the first time, I personally found the game to be one of the worst in the series.

A Fire Upon the Deep

Apparently the name of 1992 science fiction novel A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (Oct 2, 1944 – Mar 20, 2024 -- died just three days ago; a somber coincidence) was built by the author's editors in a brainstorming session: they wanted to utilize Robert A. Heinlein's technique of using either Shakespeare or the Old Testament. I have to say that what they came up with is a lot better than what Vinge had wanted to call the novel. A while back there was a Youtube video about Fire in my recommendations (again by Media Death Cult) and the novel's name is what immediately piqued my interest.

Assassin's Creed Rogue

Assassin's Creed Rogue and Unity were released on the same day back in 2014. That seems quite unusual but the reasoning was to have a release on the older gen consoles too (Xbox 360 and PS3) that never got Unity. Rogue was released few months later on PC too and years later as a remastered version for Xbox One and PS4. Rogue was pretty much like a consolidation price for the older gen: its development even helmed by kind of a secondary studio, Ubisoft Sofia, whose previous work for the series had been mainly AC Liberation.

The Grace of Kings

The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu is another literary awards winner that to me doesn't seem worthy of such recognition. A quick google search for reviews gave me a Reddit post that described the novel as cliff notes of itself, which I found a humorous yet accurate depiction.

Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag (& Freedom Cry)

My playthrough of Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag coincided with the release of Skull and Bones. The latter's development was troubled and costly -- and the end result was not something people thought worth the time it took for the game to come out. A common sentiment I saw: Ubisoft had already made one good pirate game; all they had to do was to build upon it. However, I'm not certain if Black Flag's single player campaign would have lent itself into a multiplayer live service format that easily. There's a multiplayer mode too in Black Flag but it doesn't involve naval combat, which is what Skull and Bones is about.

Dead Space (2023)

In last year's January, EA released a remake of their 2008 third person survival horror shooter, Dead Space. The remake was developed by Motive Studio, which I believe is the place BioWare Montreal's people were largely shuffled into after they were shutdown in the aftermath of Mass Effect: Andromeda. How many of the actual same people were involved, is unknown to me. But like that game, does this remake too run on EA's in-house Frostbite engine.

Lies of P

The reasons for my rule of not touching games developed by Japanese studios are many. (I should start writing them down; I feel like I've started forgetting them.) And that rule still holds. South Korea is culturally and geographically close to Japan -- at least when viewed from here -- but I haven't needed to think if they are close enough for Korean games to be included in the prohibition of mine. For the longest time South Korean studios seemed to release only pay-to-win MMORPGs in the West and those are easy for to me to ignore. But now there's Lies of P, a third person soulslike action roleplaying game released in September last year. It was on Game Pass day-one but I decided to wait for bug fixes and balance adjustments.

Gotham Knights

I wonder if Gotham Knights had a development story akin to Redfall in how it was maybe intended to be a live service title but then, for whatever reason, pivoted away from it before release. Perhaps Warner Bros. as a publisher and/or the developer studio in Montreal decided it had no staying power. Or WB deemed the then-still-in-development and now recently-released Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League more fitting as their title for Batman universe microtransactions.

Children of Memory

Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky was a big disappointment for me after the great Children of Ruin. I found the second book such an improvement after Children of Time that I suppose I had hoped this third one to be even better.

Assassin's Creed Liberation Remastered

Assassin's Creed III: Liberation (2012) was originally a PlayStation Vita game. A year and a half later it was re-released on more powerful platforms as a beautified version, titled Assassin's Creed Liberation HD. And then, years later the game was included in Assassin's Creed III Remastered likewise as a Remastered version. I have a feeling the HD and Remastered versions are identical apart from online features having been removed from the latter.

Assassin's Creed III Remastered

I finally got back to continuing my Assassin's Creed franchise run. The next game on the list was Assassin's Creed III (2012) and specifically its 7 years newer Remastered version. I was previously perplexed why Ubisoft had remastered this particular one but the reason really is obvious. It's the same as always: money. They had a good window to sell the same game again on a newer console generation.

Disco Elysium

When I listed my top 10 favorite games of the 2010s back in June of 2020, I wrote I was doubtful there would be a need to add anything from the decade's games I hadn't yet played at that point. However, there was one game from 2019 that I was thinking would make the list once I got to it: Disco Elysium. I didn't want to drop anything from the list now so I have just added this masterpiece as a +1 to it.

The Shadow of the Torturer

Yet another novel that was on my reading list and whose source of recommendation I had no recollection any longer: The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe. The back cover (the little I peeked at it) claimed it to be a science fiction classic (published in 1980) and apparently Neil Gaiman at some point rated it above Neuromancer and The Left Hand of Darkness on his list of the three greatest scifi novels. I wouldn't myself think of it that highly and I'm not so sure about the science fiction either.

Revelation Space

If Frank Herbert's Dune is an example of older science fiction literature of simpler narrative and shorter books, Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds is from the other end of the spectrum, being newer (though almost 24 years old too by now) and having three very disconnected (at least initially) layers. I had trouble keeping up with the fast-paced viewpoint switching early on in fact. Only around page 130 of the 700-page Finnish translation I noted myself having started to remember who's who.

Dune Messiah & Children of Dune

Looking back now what I wrote about the first Dune novel, it appears that I did like it more than I recall. I even read it not so long but I had already forgotten that, maybe because how easy going things seemed for the protagonists. That's why I was surprised how invested I got with the following two sequels.