Mirror's Edge Catalyst

Origin Access can be really great value for money at its low price of 4€ / month or 30€ / year. You get to play many big EA titles for a nominal fee, although I would not quite call the current total of 64 games "tons of titles". Some of them are also not the full experience. The Mass Effect series for instance does not have its infamous BioWare points requiring DLC included and you still need to buy them even with Access.

Ember

I suppose Ember made its way onto my wishlist by appearing to be an isometric RPG with real-time combat with active pause. And I suppose its journey continued into my game library because of a heavy discount. The reason why I played it till the end, I do not know. I probably should have requested a refund but it did not occur to me to do so until many hours into the game.

Wolfenstein: The New Order

Wolfenstein: The New Order is set in alternative history where Nazi Germany has won the Second World War thanks to technological superiority gained from finding a forgotten stash of some secret order of inventors. It is the seventh game in the Wolfenstein franchise, a series of first person shooters that mostly follow the adventures of Captain William "B.J." Blazkowicz. It is also a soft reboot of the series and not having played the earlier titles is not critical to understanding what is going on.

Life Is Strange

The reason I bought Life Is Strange was me being interested in how Dontnod Entertainment's second game had turned out. The overwhelmingly positive user review consensus on Steam suggested that Square Enix had done wisely for deciding to save Dontnod from bankruptcy. Not many titles have so positive a reception among players.

Shadwen

A stealth game that is also essentially one huge escort quest feels like a concept set to fail. It is certainly something I would never buy at full price (not that I do so generally anyway) but I did put it on my wishlist to wait for a better deal. I reckon the game has not sold too well because pretty soon after its release it was almost constantly discounted in some store. During Steam's winter sale, the discount got to 75% and I finally bought Shadwen.

Tyranny

I recall the announcement of Tyranny being a slight surprise in last year's March. Promising the game's release still within the passing year when Pillars of Eternity's last expansion had come out only a month earlier seemed to leave very little time for development. I guess having the tech already worked out in PoE allowed Obsidian Entertainment to finish the project faster. Picking the same date for release as Dishonored 2 (Nov 11th) was an odd choice, though.

I also got to play Tyranny unusually soon after release for a patient gamer as it was gifted to me by a certain Frenchman. (Thanks, Kane!)

Games I Finished in 2016

I tried hard to clear my game backlog in 2016. And I even succeeded at it for few months. Thanks to that, I beat a handful more titles than in 2015 -- 27 in total if I am counting them right. Sales have brought the backlog back a bit again but such is life.

Just Cause 3

I was seriously considering of getting a refund for Just Cause 3 while I was still under 2 hours of playtime. I bought the XL Edition during Steam's Autumn sale at a pretty steep discount but still, even at 75% off I felt the game's many problems made it not worth its price. In the end I decided to continue playing, however, and beat the game at 100% completion after 70 hours. Time often simply flies while screwing around in Medici -- provided the game lets you actually play it.

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon

Ubisoft has been giving out one of their games on Uplay for free every month since June as part of their 30th anniversary celebration. Most of the titles are not something I would like to play but I have claimed them to my library anyway. Beyond Good & Evil actually seems interesting but apparently it is not guaranteed to play ball with Win10. I would rather try GOG's version.

BioShocks Remastered

I managed to beat my games backlog around late summer and got a chance to replay some stuff I had wanted to for some time. The BioShock Collection's release on September coincided with the lack of new titles in my game libraries, and I decided to replay the first two BioShocks even though that was not in my plans originally.