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.