Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood

There is untapped potential in video games utilizing the many tabletop roleplaying games under the World of Darkness series. There actually exists quite a few titles using one of the licenses -- Vampire: The Masquerade being easily the most popular -- but they're largely not very high profile ones: interactive fiction games, visual novels, VR games, etc. Another truly remarkable, single-player roleplaying experience on the level of Bloodlines is yet to be made. Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood is not that either.

Ball Lightning

Ball Lightning (球状闪电 - Qiúzhuàng shǎndiàn) by Liu Cixin is a hard science fiction novel that loosely leads up to the author's later Three-Body Problem trilogy. Liu apparently wrote Ball Lightning while thinking he was about to die to liver cancer he was misdiagnosed with. That kind of explains the heavily philosophical prologue and I suppose the book's ending, which I didn't like all that much due to it leaning so much on metaphysical quantum nonsense.

Avowed

Avowed is the first game from Obsidian Entertainment under Microsoft that was of interest to me -- Grounded and Pentiment were not that. I expected the same kind of mediocrity The Outer Worlds was made of and pretty much got that. Avowed is a professional production that feels smooth and fun to play but at the same time is limited in scope and ultimately a shallow experience.

Red Rising

Red Rising by Pierce Brown is another book that I've seen being recommended. It and its sequels are available here in libraries so I decided to check out the first one. I didn't look any more to what kind of books they were but the quote on the cover from Scott Sigler told me exactly what was I about to read: "Ender, Katniss, and now Darrow."

Atomfall

Rebellion Developments is probably known best for their Sniper Elite series. The company has been around since the early 1990s, though, so they have had time to produce all manner of stuff, like the 2010 Aliens vs Predator, the single one of their games I had played before. I was recently made aware that the man on the Youtube channel Modern History TV is Rebellion's CEO, Jason Kingsley ᴄʙᴇ. It's curious that Rebellion don't seem to have attempted a medieval game series.

Slow Bullets

Slow Bullets is another shorter form science fiction story by Alastair Reynolds. I wish Like -- who's the publisher for the Finnish translations of the author's books -- had prioritized the short story anthology with the Netflix-adapted Zima Blue and Beyond the Aquila Rift over these one-off novellas because then that collection would most likely be available at the library and I could actually read it. Maybe one day...

The Alloy of Law

Brandon Sanderson has recently decided to embrace a direction that makes his books rather unappealing to me. I don't want to be constantly reminded of the raging culture war while reading a fantasy novel. Dawnshard may have been a watershed moment. However, I have yet to read many of his works published before 2020, like most of the second set of the Mistborn series.

Eternal Strands

Eternal Strands is a third person action-adventure game developed by Yellow Brick Games who are led by Mike Laidlaw of BioWare fame. The game looked akin to Immortals Fenyx Rising: colorful, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild -inspired fun, with maybe a touch of Shadow of the Colossus. However, it didn't turn out to be nearly as competent. There were few amazing moments but overall Strands is a repetitive experience that more than overstays its welcome.

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands is a Borderlands series spin-off, kind of a sequel to the Borderlands 2 DLC, Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep (which has been later released as a standalone game as well). Tiny Tina is again the bunker master for a game of Bunkers & Badasses, the Borderlands equivalent to Dungeons & Dragons. My impression is that Wonderlands was well received but its poor post-release support and monotone endgame soured its repute. The publisher 2K's recent EULA changes have also caused many to leave negative reviews on all of their games on Steam.

Outward

For the the longest time I was undecided if I really wanted to play Outward or not. It is a third person fantasy action roleplaying game that emphasizes survival mechanics, preparation, and learning by trial and error. Would it actually be fun to play or would all the management get tiresome? Since the game's release in 2019, there have been quite a few mods made for it; you no longer have to play strictly as the developer, Nine Dots Studio, intended. Thus I ended up eventually picking the game up.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (1928 – 1982) was first translated into Finnish in 1989 by Kari Nenonen in the wake of Blade Runner (1982), the film that is based on the novel. The translation got titled Palkkionmetsästäjä ("bounty hunter") and also had 'Blade Runner' on the cover like many later English printings of the novel -- impossible to make the connection between the book and the film just on their names. A couple of years ago, in 2022, there was a second Finnish translation by J. Pekka Mäkelä, instead titled after the original novel name: Uneksivatko androidit sähkölampaista?

Terminal World

Terminal World is one of Alastair Reynolds's standalone novels. Its Finnish title, Pääteasema, discarded the world part and is instead the (compound) word for terminal station. It gives off a somewhat different meaning but I suppose it can be interpreted in a more figurative way that aligns with the original too. But I definitely took it in the former and I think that threw me off a bit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Virtuos Games instead.

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.

On the Steel Breeze

On the Steel Breeze is the second novel in the Poseidon's Children trilogy (series?) by Alastair Reynolds. The Akinya family's still in the protagonist role but the series didn't turn out to be the kind of family saga I was expecting -- hoping, even. I don't know how the Akinyas managed to squander their riches but they did have the time: this novel takes place a couple of centuries later. Only a single human generation has passed, though: aging having been defeated once again.