Inhibitor Phase

Had I read Absolution Gap right when it came out in 2003, it would have been a long 18-year-wait to see if Nevil Clavain's last wish would lead to anything like I suspected. But because I read Gap just last year, I only had to wait until now that I got to reading Inhibitor Phase (which was published in 2021).

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.