Forgot to mention, I also played through Neverending Nightmares, in a way. Truth be told, I only played for 40 minutes and then watched the remaining 20 on YouTube at double speed. I liked the art style, and the atmosphere is alright, but the major part of the game is just slowly walking through rooms that look very similar to each other, like they're randomly recycled or something. I get that it kind of fits the title and the concept of the game, which is based on the author's struggle with OCD and depression, the constant repetition does evoke feelings of despair and hopelessness, but in a game that's not such an unusual and interesting experience. It doesn't make you think or empathize, just makes you want to skip this game. Watching it on YouTube wasn't a big difference to playing it, except for the increased speed, which felt like an improvement ...

Hotline Miami 2. More of the same, but not as satisfying because this game emphasizes gunplay a lot more than the first one. The look-ahead function is kind of awkward to use, and even then you're likely to get killed many times because the top-down view prevents you from seeing gun-toting enemies just off-screen, but they can see and shoot you before you even know they're reacting to you. This effect is also emphasized by game featuring a lot more levels with windows. It makes it a bit harder to get into that adrenalized flow that was a big part of the fun in the original game. I also missed some of the odd weapons you could get in the original, like grabbing a pot of boiling water from a stove and flinging it in an enemy's face - maybe I just overlooked all those opportunities...

The story is actually kind of intriguing, with a lot more characters you can control, giving different perspectives on what's going on, although the premise is even more absurd. The game's soundtrack is bigger - some songs are really good but some are just blah.

Shadow Warrior 2

Thank you again GOG for the wonderful gift! This became the first game that I finished after finally upgrading my ancient Radeon 4850 to a GTX 1050 ti (and would've saved $20 had I waited just 3 days for Black Friday, ah well live and learn.) Anyway, great game, got pretty addicted to it. Played on Insane 1 difficulty for the most part, raising in the second half and ending on Insane 4. Not sure I'm gonna do New Game+, at least not any time soon.

AER Memories of Old

A nice, relaxing and melancholy walking/flying simulator (not that kind of flight sim mind you) with mild platforming and puzzle elements, lots of exploration, and an ending that makes you go "huh?"

SickBrick

Meh FPS with horrible optimization (final level played at 20fps no matter what), meh gameplay and pretty bad final boss fight (if you don't know what to do, you face an infinitely reinforced enemies, once you figure out what to do you can take out the final boss while he's monologuing at you). Also apparently the dev who published the game actually stole it from the real developer or something.

Injustice: Gods Among Us Ultimate Edition

Not a fan of fighting games (as I suck at them and have not the patience to train to be good), so I only redeemed this key from Humble Bundle because I heard the story was good. And it really is. Story Mode is basically a DCAU Justice League movie interspersed with fighting gameplay scenes. Medium difficulty turned out to be just right for me - challenging enough that I couldn't win with just button mashing, easy enough that all battles were beatable (some after a retry).

Assassin's Creed Odyssey (UPLAY)

Well, I finally decided my list of "games waiting for a new PC" got too big and I built a new PC. It was only meant to be for playing last gen games at 1440p or above, not so much current AAA. But...as luck would have it, when looking for the best price for a 1050ti as the GPU, I found somewhere selling out their RX570/580 stock...so I ended up with an 8GB RX580 for only $15 more than a GTX1050ti. What I didn't know was the deal came with an AMD promo...3 game codes, AC Odyssey being one of them. The others being Strange Brigade and Star Control: Origins.

What a great game too. 140 hours for full completion. Three main story quests that send you all over the ancient Greek mainland and Islands. The best world ever in an open world RPG. The game pre dates the Assassin's order, so none of them or Templars, but still ties into the overall meta story.

I played as Kassandra, one of the best characters ever put into an RPG as a fixed option. The Grand daughter of Leonidas himself (you know- of the 300?) Great voice acting all the way, she is a foul mouthed brutal mercenary that will happily kill for money- it's her job. Best of all she is a woman that looks powerful enough to actually swing the weapons she uses. Kassandra is also genuinely funny sometimes, in a cynical sort of way. Of course you get to meet some of histories rich and famous from the era- Socrates, Hypocrates, even Pythogoras.

The game improves in pretty much every aspect of the formula established last year in Origins. But the biggest area of improvement is the quests- both story and side quests. To start with, choose the explore mode which removes a lot of the artificial help markers from the game- no mini map radar and only a compass bar at the top of the screen when out of combat. Talking to people gives you directions and landmarks. So you head off and, when close to the target, use Ikaros (the Eagle) to scout. Some of the quests really send you out exploring the world and last the entire game...even some of the side quests. Of course the game also has it's share of common generated fetch quests as well, mainly for use if you want to do some levelling or to play after story completion.

And the game looks amazing. That leads to the only flaw in a way. This game requires serious CPU hardware, a recent i7 or 2700x for 60fps. With a new 6 core CPU this could not hold 60fps well enough at 1080p- well I didn't try low settings, I don't play at low settings. The fps sitting at 50 simply caused a lot of stutter, so I ended up capping to 30 for the usual console experience- like every AC game I've played, so no big deal. At 30fps at least it was smooth and consistent and never dropped a frame. It also allowed me to set the resolution to 1440p at high and very high settings. Of course, if I had the Xbox version I'd be playing at the same frame rate and between 1800p and 2160p same settings...PC master race my ass. But it saves me buying the Xbox version and it still looked great.

With only 4 weeks to go, this is looking like my game of the year easily (a month ago I thought Forza Horizon 4 had it easily), in fact it's one of my all time favorites as far as open world games go and it's my favorite AC game now.

Happy Glass

(It was long.)

The Gardens Between (XB1X)

Recently released artsy sort of puzzle game that I played with game pass. For anyone that has played Life is Strange you will know about the main puzzle solving mechanic- manipulate time, change something, manipulate time. Well that's the main idea in this game as well. You have to guide 2 kids through 8 worlds reliving surreal versions of their memories. The reason only really makes sense at the end.

The girl can carry a lantern, the boy can activate switches. You can only advance by moving time forwards or backwards. Like the best puzzle games it introduces the concept simply and finishes up with the final worlds making you scratch your head a bit- but nothing rage inducingly difficult.

It's a really good little game actually. The only problem for a lot of people would be it's short length, you should finishing it completely with all achievements in 3 hours or less. It's a worthwhile 3 hours spent though. It's on all three consoles and PC but not GOG- it should be, so vote for it if you like these types of games: https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/the_gardens_between

HITMAN™, Murdered: Soul Suspect, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Gears of War 4, DOOM 2016, Battlefield Hardline/1, Titanfall 2, Halo 4/5, Mass Effect Andromeda, Shadow Complex, Inside, Limbo, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Octodad, Metro 2033. probably a few more but I can't remember.
EDIT: add SWAT 4 and Warhammer 40,000 Space Marines

Mini Ghost. It's a short Metroid-ish game by the guy who made Unepic that evokes the style of MSX games. It's a prequel to Ghost 1.0, which I haven't looked at but this one was like $1 when I bought it and it was certainly worth that. You control a robot who infiltrates a space station full of malfunctioning robots, you blast stuff and pick up upgrades and keycards that let you get farther into it and blow up the main computer running everything.

I never bothered to finish Unepic because I hated the final boss stage, but this was fine. Handles well and looks okay. Nothing amazing but it's a decent way to spend a few hours.

Batman: Arkham Asylum, first time. It still holds up, I had a blast. Great atmosphere, great story, functonal gameplay.

yea, I slept on that game for years until it was 20 bucks on xbl. a lot unreal engine games in that gen were like what unity games are today. gameplay and storywise asylum is the only good one imo.

Trine 2 - beautiful puzzle platformer that allows you to make puzzles easier by upgrading your abilities. At least I [i]assume[i] some of the puzzles are possible without upgrades, as there were a few I barely managed to pass using max box+planks stacking. The final boss battle though left a bad taste in my mouth, as did learning that while Steam tells me I own Trine 2 Complete Edition, my Edition is very much Incomplete - none of the DLC content was there.

I feel the same way. just don't play the second one.
the game is bullshit

11/16
Diablo 3: Eternal Collection (Switch) - 5/5 - My 5th complete time going through D3's campaign and 2nd time going through Reaper of Souls, but first time on either with a controller. The controller and portability were enough features to warrant me buying this again despite having both collector editions. It's still as responsive, punchy and addicting as its PC counterpart. For those on the fence, I highly recommend it. I've played well over 400 hours since D3's PC release.

12/4
South Park: Fractured But Whole + Season Pass (Switch) - 3/5 - I was super excited to play this on the Switch having played the original (The Stick of Truth) on my Xbox One earlier this year. I gave SOT a 4/5. FBW should have been better than SOT on paper: superhero theme, more complexity during combat, experienced dev team, longer game in general. But the last point really hurt it.

Being a primarily story-based gamer, it's my biggest incentive to play games. I expect any South Park game to have an absolute nutty story, but FBW's just didn't seem to end. There were at least 2 times I thought the game was over when It turned out it wasn't causing me to feel a bit burnt out. This same thing has happened exactly once to me before with Dishonored 1 and then too it soured my perception of that game. Also fighting the same bosses again, sometimes right after I had just fought them was a poor design decision in my opinion.

The only reason I rated it as high as it is, is because of the Season Pass extra stories: From Dusk til Casa Bonita and Bring the Crunch. The DLC was actually worth it. Casa Bonita was perfect: short, sweet, isolated with some new abilities and items. Bring the Crunch is about twice as long as Casa Bonita with an entire new class and a new superhero buddy as well. The stories are well done because the locations are isolated and limited

Honestly if FBW's story was fixed along with removing duplicate boss battles I would probably rate it a 4.5/5 because they really hurt the experience

Previous games

Slime Rancher

I didn't play very efficiently and lost quite a lot of time with repetitive, somewhat meaningless chores, then took a break and had to orient myself anew when trying to get back into it, so it took me up to 30 hours until I reached the ending of the Adventure Story, which came as a bit of a surprise and felt a little underwhelming, and afterwards the game just continues, allowing you to farm and explore in all eternity, but apart from a few loose ends (one or two slimes and teleporters I didn't find yet, the post-game secret vaults, some curios to build, some arcade challenges to beat) the only goal would be to make the farm more efficient and earn lots of money, and that sounds rather boring to me. So I'm not sure if I'll still play it this year - and if I don't, I probably won't ever, so I'll consider it completed for now.

All in all, I quite enjoyed the game. Exploring the colorful cute world was fun, there was a lot to discover about the ecosystem, and IIRC the game didn't take you by the hand too much and mostly let you find out everything on your own. Building and economics were simple enough so that they didn't ruin it (I'm not a fan of management sims, but this is quite different). And it was quite addictive, since there was always something to do, something new to aim for or solve.

What I didn't like so much was all the running to and fro between the farm areas, the constant feeding and plot harvesting, all the recurring chores that soon get old and then begin to feel like a waste of time. There are ways to move quicker around the farm and automate the processes a bit, but - maybe also due to how I ran the farm and where I set priorities - I only got access to them very late in the game because they require quite a lot of rarer resources to build. That's why at times the game felt a bit too much like hollow grinding for resources and numbers, barely disguised by adorable graphics and sounds. I probably spent a lot more time on the farm than adventuring in the wilderness, although ultimately the latter was more fun. And I didn't like that areas you can access early on have treasure chests that you can only open after acquiring late game skills, but the map doesn't allow custom notes, so you'd have to remember where you saw the chests or search already explored areas a second and third time later on.

Apart from that, great game. Probably quite enjoyable for kids, too.