Steelrising

Almost exactly a year before Lies of P, there was Steelrising. In addition to both games being third person soulslike action RPGs, their settings are coincidentally very similar as well. Steelrising takes place in alternate Paris during the French Revolution, and like in Lies of P later, automats roams the streets, killing everyone.

Batora: Lost Haven

I suppose Batora: Lost Haven by Stormind Games had looked enough like Darksiders Genesis for me to buy it: a stylized top-down twin-stick hack and slash shooter. Visually the game didn't disappoint; I really liked the purple-orange dual color theme. Gameplay turned out to be pretty basic, however, and mechanics rather shallow. But the game's biggest problem is its writing.

The Entropy Centre

It had been a while since I last played an entirely new (for me) first person puzzle-platformer. While I had played a few in the past and we're not exactly lacking in these chamber-based Portal-without-portals games, they don't always look entertaining enough. The Entropy Centre by Stubby Games did, however. Its gimmick is rewinding objects backwards in time.

En Garde!

En Garde! (with an exclamation mark) had looked like one of the rare few gaming highlights of otherwise unexciting 2023 to me: a vibrant and lighthearted swashbuckler game. The actual experience turned out to be quite frustrating now that I got to actually play it. That was probably in part due to lack of skill when going for all achievements but I think that certain mechanics can be rage-inducing, even when trying to get through the game casually.

Scars Above

I feel video games wouldn't need to be so bound to having artificial gravity on spaceships. They're not restricted by real life, not filming real actors that need to be dropped down and up aboard a plane (or whatever technique they use) to float about. Of course, it might take some unusual work to animate characters (zero-g motion capture?), script scenes, and design ship interiors and movement for microgravity but it's been done before. I think it would add to immersion and you wouldn't need to increase the expected level of in-game technology to something so high. If humanity had the ability to create artificial gravity within ships, surely they would be able to send something bigger than a small, mere 4-person ship to greet a colossal alien object that has arrived to Earth's orbit like in Scars Above.

Drakensang: The River of Time

Drakensang: The River of Time is a prequel to Drakensang, released a year (in Germany) or two (North America) after the first game. As far as I could tell, the subtitle doesn't refer to anything specific (even though the locations are by a river): it's merely something characters say when speaking of the passing of time. The main story is less of a world-saving epic in this one; for the majority of the game I didn't even know what exactly the main quest was even going to be about.

All Systems Red

All Systems Red by Martha Wells is a science fiction novella, the first volume in The Murderbot Diaries. The book was sort of an impulse pick for me. I had heard the series was adapted into an Apple TV show, and thought I might check out what the books are about. The novella length surprised me, though: the hard covers could have held a full novel inside them but there turned out to be not that much text on the pages. And I suppose not that many pages either: 191 in the Finnish translation.