EVERSPACE

The last space combat game I had played previously was Freelancer many years ago. Its story ended all of a sudden and I was left on my own to do repetitive randomly generated tasks, which were alike to Skyrim's "radiant" quests -- the same dogfights over and over again. Or at least so I vaguely recall. It gave me a slight distaste for the genre and I hadn't touched it again until now.

Agony

Perhaps Agony wasn't the biggest scam of a game in 2018 but it sure did manage to get a lot of undeserved attention. Judging by a handful of comments I've seen, some people also mistook it for another, still upcoming game called Scorn, and were then doubly disappointed.

Brave New World (and briefly of Animal Farm)

The Finnish title for Brave New World by Aldous Huxley bothers me. Not because Uljas uusi maailma is a mistranslation but because the identical word order in Finnish sounds clumsy to me. You have to emphasize the end of uljas to avoid muddling the consonant to the following word. Uusi uljas maailma instead rolls off the tongue more naturally and I've seen others accidentally calling the book by that name too. But even if the translator thought so as well, they probably wanted to keep the title matching to an earlier translation of William Shakespeare's Tempest: "How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, / That has such people in't."

Bound By Flame

Bound By Flame is a third person action roleplaying game developed by a French studio called Spiders and published by Focus Home Interactive in 2014. It didn't look like the most expensive production but I hoped it would still be able to provide entertainment.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (and briefly of Thus Spoke Zarathustra)

I was at one of the local libraries recently. There's a shelf for newly returned books, divided into genres. I checked the scifi/fantasy section to see what people were reading and to my amusement was reminded of a picture (or two) I had seen of someone moving George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four from their fiction section to non-fiction. I didn't move the book to non-fiction but instead picked it to read it myself as I had never done so.

The Talos Principle

The Talos Principle was my sole purchase from Steam's 2018 winter sale. An impulse purchase too, the decision assisted by a deep discount and overall overwhelmingly positive user reviews. It is a puzzle game comparable to Portal although The Turing Test with its philosophical and ethical aspects might be closer.

King Rat

They say an author should write about what they know. King Rat, James Clavell's debut novel, is a result of that advice and quite a vivid one too. It is a semi-fictional story based on the author's time as a prisoner of war at Changi prison camp in Singapore during World War II.

Gai-Jin

Gai-Jin ('foreigner') was the last novel James Clavell wrote for the Asian Saga before his death. Its purpose was to tie together Shōgun and the Struan Noble House that is present in four of the series' books. And indeed, even though set in 1862, 262 years after Shōgun, Gai-Jin references a lot of the older novel's events and characters.

Pillars of Eternity

Pillars of Eternity was quite cheap a year ago in the beat-the-average tier of Humble Paradox Bundle. I paid less than 6€ for it but I could've waited a few months more as the game became even cheaper at the end of the summer when the definitive edition was on the house for Twitch Prime members. But I did get the game's expansions (practically) for free thanks to that.

Life Is Strange: Before the Storm

Since Life Is Strange was so well received, Square Enix (most likely) wanted to expand the franchise. Dontnod Entertainment wasn't quite ready yet to continue the series, however, and instead the task was handed to Deck Nine.