Silverfall: Earth Awakening

Years ago, I eyed up Silverfall, an isometric action roleplaying game developed by a now-defunct French company Monte Cristo, wondering whether I should buy it. I decided against it -- which was a smart decision because there are dozens of more interesting and entertaining titles in the genre out there, especially these days. However, last year I saw someone on my Steam friendlist pick up the game and its standalone expansion Earth Awakening -- most likely entirely for collection purposes -- while they were next to free on sale. Against my better judgment, I bought them too but with the intention of actually playing through them. (Don't do that.)

Legend

I borrowed Legend by David Gemmell (1948 – 2006) from the local library because I remembered reading one of his novels a couple of decades ago and wanted a refresher on how his heroic fantasy was like. There's a pretty high chance the novel was this one because only two of Gemmell's works have ever been translated into Finnish. The other one would be the second volume of this same Drenai series, called The King Beyond the Gate whose Finnish title for some reason was quite liberally set, instead meaning 'prince of shadows' (Varjojen prinssi).

Far Cry 6

My Ubisoft game binge continued even further when Ubisoft+ was free for a month again right after I was done with Assassin's Creed Revelations. In addition to Far Cry 6, I was going to use the month to play through AC Valhalla's DLC but they announced the game would be still getting one final story update (which it just got now in December) so I decided to postpone that until next time. Far Cry 6 also took a lot longer to beat than I had anticipated. I did however briefly revisit AC Odyssey as well for the crossover story it got. Turns out there's not much actual crossover on Odyssey's side: Kassandra just has a bit of a holiday trip and prepares to live through the ages with the Staff.

Edgedancer

Edgedancer by Brandon Sanderson is a novella in the epic fantasy series The Stormlight Archive, set between its volumes two and three. Its protagonist is Lift who we already met in an interlude of Words of Radiance. Sanderson felt Lift needed a longer introduction before she becomes more important in the series.

It

I don't know what prompted me to read It by Stephen King. I must have seen some reference to it or something. It has been a while since I watched the 2017 and 2019 film adaptations too (which I barely remember). I rarely even read horror fiction -- not because it's scary but the opposite. The whole thing kind of loses its point if there's nothing else to it.

Assassin's Creed Revelations

Unlike previously in the series, Assassin's Creed Revelations' (almost) whole open world is unlocked very early on. I did right away pretty much everything that didn't progress the main memory sequence and thus had an unusually story-focused playthrough after sequence 3. That may have had a slight effect but I think that even without beelining the story, Revelations' ending is a very satisfying and conclusive finale for the Ezio trilogy.

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood

I started Assassin's Creed Brotherhood expecting a quick and cheap standalone expansion kind of deal. To my surprise, it instead polished and added enough to stand on its own as a separate game.

Assassin's Creed II

It's like I had skipped a game in the series. The first one truly was like a tech demo, a proof of concept, so much does Assassin's Creed II improve from it. The potential was claimed and the result is a well-rounded game that is surprisingly close to the newer end of the series, at least feature-wise -- there's still room for polishing.

Assassin's Creed

My Assassin's Creed franchise run (of the pre-Syndicate games) started earlier than intended when Ubisoft in July (I think it was) announced that on September 1st they would again decommission online services (i.e. anything that requires an online connection, including the redeeming of unlocked Ubisoft Connect rewards) of a selection of their older titles. At the end of August, Ubisoft postponed the decommissioning by a month, allowing me to finish all of the affected AC titles in time.

Project Hail Mary

It's such an optimistic thought that humanity could ever be capable of interstellar travel. A tremendous amount of energy would be needed to be harnessed for a spaceship to reach a feasible velocity for so vast distances. Science fiction novels like presenting different ways to accomplish this, with varying degrees of plausibility. In Andy Weir's third published novel, Project Hail Mary (2021), the solution is quite an imaginative one, quite the fantasy for the required technological leap. It is also the problem that raises the need for interstellar travel: the Sun is dimming.