Disco Elysium

When I listed my top 10 favorite games of the 2010s back in June of 2020, I wrote I was doubtful there would be a need to add anything from the decade's games I hadn't yet played at that point. However, there was one game from 2019 that I was thinking would make the list once I got to it: Disco Elysium. I didn't want to drop anything from the list now so I have just added this masterpiece as a +1 to it.

The Shadow of the Torturer

Yet another novel that was on my reading list and whose source of recommendation I had no recollection any longer: The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe. The back cover (the little I peeked at it) claimed it to be a science fiction classic (published in 1980) and apparently Neil Gaiman at some point rated it above Neuromancer and The Left Hand of Darkness on his list of the three greatest scifi novels. I wouldn't think of it that highly and I'm not so sure about the science fiction either.

Revelation Space

If Frank Herbert's Dune is an example of older science fiction literature of simpler narrative and shorter books, Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds is from the other end of the spectrum, being newer (though almost 24 years old too by now) and having three very disconnected (at least initially) layers. I had trouble keeping up with the fast-paced viewpoint switching early on in fact. Only around page 130 of the 700-page Finnish translation I noted myself having started to remember who's who.

Dune Messiah & Children of Dune

Looking back now what I wrote about the first Dune novel, it appears that I did like it more than I recall. I even read just a while back but I had already forgotten that, maybe because how easy going things seemed for the protagonists. That's why I was surprised how invested I got with the following two sequels.

Games I Finished in 2023

Some say 2023 was a great year for games. For me, personally, I'd say it was above average. There was a handful of good (or at least good-seeming) games but nothing obviously superb -- and then few disappointing ones as well.

Middle-earth: Shadow of War

Middle-earth: Shadow of War built upon its predecessor Shadow of Mordor in various ways. However, despite all its additions, Shadow of War treads the same waters so much that I feel its main purpose was selling the same game again -- just with added microtransactions. Shadow of War's lootboxes were received so poorly that Monolith Productions/WB Games ended up removing them a year after the game's release while also retuning the epilogue chapter which players had criticized to be an extremely arduous grind when refusing to engage with the game's real money store.

Amnesia: The Bunker

Amnesia: Rebirth wasn't all that well received, as I recall. I had hoped otherwise after SOMA: it's possible that its brilliant writing was largely thanks to Mikael Hedberg who left Frictional Games after the fact. Epic gave away Rebirth at some point and it's still making its way up on my backlog. Frictional's next game, Amnesia: The Bunker appeared on Game Pass soon after its release -- better-received than Rebirth. I had thought to skip past the backlog to play Rebirth first but because the two games are not connected, I decided otherwise.

Jusant

Game Pass's 1€ trial returned in a nerfed manner: being only 2 weeks in length. Evidently that's not long enough for me to beat 2 short games and 1 bigger one (in a completionist style). I will have to return to finish the latter, Gotham Knights, some other time.

Dawnshard

Dawnshard is the second "novella" (56k words) in Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive, set between the series' third and fourth volumes. Its protagonist is tradesmaster Rysn Ftori who sets out on an expedition to Akinah, a lost city on an island shrouded in storms.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker

Owlcat Games have been better than Mundfish in their claim to be an international studio based in Cyprus, seemingly having avoided bigger controversies so far. The masquerade seems to be holding up even now with their newest game, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, which came out a couple of weeks ago. Russia has not really been mentioned in the headlines the game has made up to this point.