Prey: Mooncrash

Metaprogression has become increasingly more common in new games with roguelike elements. I reckon that's because people simply hate permadeath so much. Even with procedurally generated content (which in theory is what makes permadeath to have more value than merely being a punishing difficulty), the thought of losing everything upon death really puts them off. Thus permadeath games that move forward even with botched runs seem to sell better.

ECHO

Danish game developer ULTRA ULTRA closed their doors about a month ago. The sole game they put out before that didn't sell well enough to keep them afloat. After having played it, I am not surprised. Echo (stylized in caps as ECHO) has some impressive visual detail but is ultimately a painfully repetitive and unrewarding gaming experience.

Whirlwind

The Asian Saga ends with its low point when reading it in the series' internal chronological order. Or at least I personally found Whirlwind to have the least interesting characters and setting among all the books.

Noble House

Hong Kong in 1963 isn't as interesting of a setting as it was in 1866. Even the current day would've been more intriguing with the region having been returned to China as well as China's rather strong position in the world's economics. But 1963 is dull to me like about all of the 20th century.

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.