Days Gone

Sony's exclusive first-party console games from the late 2010s started making their way to PC at the turn of the decade. Days Gone was not the first of them but it was the first to make it onto my backlog. The game's reception was lukewarm and maybe that's why Sony declined the pitch for a sequel by Bend Studio. Overall Days Gone is an extremely solid production; its weakness lies in its plot premise and writing. The game does however cast a delicious sequel hook at the end, and people who've gotten that far do seem to want to see where a second game would go.

Authority & Acceptance

Sort of morbid curiosity led me to read the rest of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy -- and apparently a fourth book, Absolution, is already forthcoming. It puzzles me quite a bit that there's demand for this kind of unrewarding literature that offers mystery without answers. I didn't find the books compelling at all; everything is so meaningless when anything can happen, consequences don't matter.

Lords of the Fallen (2023)

The 2023 reboot of Lords of the Fallen dropped its definite article eventually and instead one has to use the release year to distinguish the titles -- which might actually be clearer. The developer studio CI Games had founded to make the game also ended up being called Hexworks instead of the initially announced 'Defiant Games' for whatever reason.

Redemption Ark

I can say now that Chasm City is definitely preferable to be read before Redemption Ark: a key character from the former novel appears in the latter and he will mean very little to you otherwise. In fact, one should read most of the short stories in the Galactic North anthology beforehand as well -- which I hadn't done. I was quite annoyed when Redemption Ark was referring to the events in them.

Still Wakes the Deep

Ah, dammit, here we go again: yet another first person horror walking simulator with a cool title but not much else to give. Such a great name, though -- Still Wakes the Deep. It evokes the same feelings as the names of the couple of Vernor Vinge's novels I've read, that use of 'deep' as a noun. I also love how one can read the title in two ways: the deep waking yet again or the deep waking unmoving. In the game you can find a poem where title seems to have originated from -- unknown if it was written for the game or if it existed before the fact.

The Callisto Protocol

The times certainly were apt for a spiritual successor to Dead Space: EA had pretty much abandoned the into-a-dead-end-written series -- and horror games don't bring in the big bucks, anyway. The field was -- or at least had seemed to be -- open wide, but in the end Striking Distance Studios had to hurry to get The Callisto Protocol out in time: in-2021-announced Dead Space remake threatened to steal their thunder.

New Spring

I had completely forgotten about New Spring until I happened to come across it in the local library recently. New Spring is the prequel novel to the epic fantasy series, The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. It was originally published as a novella just before The Path of Daggers but Jordan later lengthened the novella to a full-size book which was released after Crossroads of Twilight. Despite that it's not even half the size of the usual Wheel of Time novel.

Evil West

Like Shadow Warrior 3, which I already played, was Evil West also a 2022 release from Flying Wild Hog. Evil West is a similar experience too: straightforward, linear entertainment.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning

THQ Nordic had at some point acquired the rights to the third person action roleplaying game Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning from EA and commissioned Kaiko to remaster it. (Kaiko had previously put together the Darksiders Warmastered Edition.) The remaster, Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning, was released in 2020 and came with all its old downloadable content, which include two expansions I had never bought nor played. Kaiko also set out to develop a whole new expansion for the game: Fatesworn, which came out in 2021.

Chasm City

People further than me into Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space series say Chasm City is readable at any point: it's a standalone prequel that deepens the setting without being integral to the overarching plot. I was going to adhere to that advice and ignore the novel until later but then the back cover of Redemption Ark's Finnish translation advertised it as the "third book in the series". I thought I might as well read Chasm City first and then continue with Ark.