The Fractal Prince & The Causal Angel

Hannu Rajaniemi kept his heavy show-don't-tell style until the very end of his Quantum Thief trilogy. Only in the third novel I got a somewhat clear understanding of the factions and the recent history of the setting: how things came to be. The trilogy is certainly a wild ride all the way through. There's no stopping for strange words; you just keep reading and hope things will make sense at some point.

Control: AWE & The Foundation

Control Ultimate Edition was on Prime Gaming to claim, about two years ago now. I did just that (for free too with a trial, I think) because I wanted to play the game's downloadable content. I have to say that I was surprised how girthy both of the expansions were -- I had expected them to be maybe two hours at max each but instead they were several. I replayed the main game too -- and couldn't tell if anything was different (other than better performance on a more powerful GPU) -- because I didn't feel like figuring out if the game pass saves would work with the GOG version.

Metro 2034 & 2035

There are many years between the publications of Dmitry Glukhovsky's Metro novels. Metro 2033 was first released in 2002 (online -- printed in 2005), Metro 2034 in 2009, and finally Metro 2035 came out in 2015. With over a decade between the first and last, it's not terribly surprising there was a shift in direction -- especially with the final book -- Glukhovsky finding different things more important.

Tomb Raider: Underworld

Tomb Raider: Underworld was apparently developed concurrently with Anniversary, which led to the team on Underworld being understaffed. I don't think it shows too much in the game. Gameplay has few quirks but also advancements. And there is a good finale to the game.

Annihilation

I was interested to see if Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer was as much nonsense as its film adaptation. I've occasionally seen people mentioning they liked the movie even though it was a box office bomb. I suppose it was easier to start watching on Netflix than go to a theater to specifically see it. I found the movie pointless -- much like the novel now. They got that right.

Oathbringer

Like the second novel in The Stormlight Archive, took the third one too an enormously long time for me to get through. It didn't help that, unlike with the previous two, there was no 2-volume print of Oathbringer available: just holding a nearly 1300-page hardcover brick is unpleasant every time. It was mainly the content that made the book a struggle to read though.

Pushing Ice

Alastair Reynolds appears to be a fairly read author here based on the availability of his bibliography in the local libraries. And now looking at how many of his novels have been translated into Finnish -- it's about all of them! I thought that maybe I too should read more of his works (in addition to House of Suns) and picked off another of his standalone novels, Pushing Ice, which I read in English. I realized that Reynolds (being Welsh) writes in British English when a spacesuit's "torch" was used to light the way.

The Quantum Thief

In a chase for science fiction literature similar to the greatness of Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, Hannu Rajaniemi was one of the authors I have seen being recommended. I don't remember if that recommendation was in relation to hard scifi -- if so, I was misled. I could have possibly made that assumption myself to based on Rajaniemi's background in math and physics. I wouldn't classify The Quantum Thief as hard scifi: the technology in it is sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic, too far on the hypothetical spectrum.

Tomb Raider: Anniversary

Tomb Raider: Anniversary is a remake of the original, a decade older Tomb Raider (1996). Essentially, Anniversary recreates the original in a newer engine with expanded environments and tells its story in a more comprehensible manner that was also altered to fit the following events of Tomb Raider: Legend. In Anniversary, Lara is hired by a rich businesswoman Jacqueline Natla to find an artifact called Scion of Atlantis.

Tomb Raider: Legend

The classic Tomb Raider games made by Core Design between 1996 and 2003 are too old for me to play now. They look terribly blocky and are no doubt extremely clunky to play: unapproachable for someone who didn't experience them back in the day. But I was interested to play the subsequent Legend trilogy (2006 -- 2008) which was developed the same Crystal Dynamics as most of the newest reboot ones.