Yeah, I wish they would make another SR game as well. All three games had something special, which drew me into them. And thank you for correction, the description said it is about 6 hours long. But even if it is double the length, I should be able to finish it before the end of the week.

I have replayed Inherit the Earth in German. Isometric view point and click adventure from 1994. It has many of the problems of the genre adding up to the unusual choice of the pow, that doesn't work well as in the games from the BROTHEHOOD as you don't just have pixel hunting but item hunting in wide places to explore only a small portion of which is displyed at a time for the resolution limit. Many crashes, escpecially in the last part. What is still good is the graphics and the cute anthropomorphised animals that populate the world of the game. German voices are ok, also considered that the game is from 1994, even if some characters sound like the actor is reading without knowing what they are saying (the Elk King...). There's a lot of unnecessary backtraking and many puzzles are just doing errands. It would have been good if it was possible to double click to leave a screen faster. Shops and other places you need to enter look just the same as others that have a repeated interior, so you might miss them. Many labyrinths get tiring soon and it's better to rely on the adventurer's guide included in the extras. All considered still a game that retains its charm.

The Order of the Thorne: The King's Challenge, Dec 24 (GOG)-Everytime I see the title I think it says throne instead of thorne. This game was a little worse than Quest for Infamy in everyway which is all the more disappointing since I really enjoyed Quest for Infamy despite what I saw as some flaws. This seems like a decent prologue to a longer story and it does set up a sequel for the future but the game by itself doesn't have much.

Full List

Aliens (C64 - U.S./Activision version). Unlike the first-person European version, this one is a series of minigames based on particular sequences from the movie. The first stage is having to fly the dropship along a specific course, which will look familiar to anyone who's ever played Activision's Master of the Lamps (the creator of that game did the music for this one). Stage 2 might be the most well-rounded in that you have to switch among four marines to get them out of the hive and back to the APC while fending off alien attacks. Stage 3 feels like a reversed version of Activision's Stampede, in which you have to ward off aliens with a flamethrower until Hicks melt the door open. Stage 4 is Newt leading the survivors through the air ducts. Stage 5 is Ripley rescuing Newt, quite similar to stage 2. Stage 6 is the Alien Queen/power loader fight.

I beat the game in quite uninspiring fashion, having gotten all my marines killed by the end of stage 4, so no Hicks surviving until the, er, opening of Alien 3 for me. The game has a weird difficulty curve in that stage one is pretty tough until you get the knack for overcoming it, while stages 2 through 4 mostly are a factor of not just beating the stage but keeping as many marines alive as you can so your margin for error increases on the next stages. Stage 5 is pretty easy, and stage 6 isn't that hard but is quite tedious to figure out how to simply grab the queen so you can drop her out the airlock.

The graphics are alright for their time, but the music, which doesn't follow the film score, is pretty good. At its best, the game creates a solid feeling of tension similar to the film.

Giants: Citizen Kabuto


Well, I didn't really finish it, but I played two thirds of it and have now decided to put it away for the time being, because the last campaign (as the monster Kabuto) didn't appeal that much to me and I really should get some work done and cut down on distractions anyway. I'd say mostly it's still a game well worth playing. I especially liked the first campaign (except its last mission) where you're playing as a kind of space marine with a jetpack, those action-packed levels were a lot of fun. The 2nd campaign where you play as Delphi (some kind of sea witch) was also good, but it was dragged down by several base-building missions which are just ultra-tedious and should have been cut from the game imo. It also featured several racing missions on a kind of jetski, but I didn't find those overly frustrating (though I can see how other players might be enraged them, if it blocks their progress).
The game doesn't allow you to save during the missions, which is mostly ok, since most missions are short, but it is somewhat annoying in the base-building missions which take longer (though problems are somewhat mitigated by the fact that you don't lose all progress if your character dies and you restart the mission, you keep the buildings you built before).
Story is extremely silly, but in a good, light-hearted way, and given how depressing the real world is, I actually appreciated it.
Despite some flaws, still a good game today imo.
My rating: 4/5.

Frog Detective 2: The Case of the Invisible Wizard

When I reviewed the first game last year, I wrote: "The dialogues are somewhat quirky and funny, the story is predictable, the puzzles are hardly existent. You mostly just talk to everyone and the puzzles more or less solve themselves in the process. (...) This one might be suited for little kids, even if some of the jokes might go over their head." I think this pretty much describes the second game, too, only that the novelty has worn off now, and the sequel felt even more formulaic. For titles with so little actual gameplay I would expect the story and dialogues to be really something, but they actually are just fine, mildly amusing occasionally, but rather harmless and tame, often suggesting to be aimed at children, but then sometimes also not. I put these games in the same category as e.g. The Real Texas, in that I really have trouble recognizing the target audience - weird games for children? naive games for adults? They are somewhat cute but at a very simplistic level, and somewhat entertaining but also a bit boring with their lack of true interaction and in the end rather simple dialogues. When I played through this sequel today I realized I was getting sleepy but I still forced myself to complete it (~80 minutes). There were other reasons for my sleepiness, of course, but the game didn't do much to distract me from it ... It's not a bad game, just not really that exciting either, at least not for the average adult, I guess.


missed messages

Unfortunately, this freeware game woke me up again, when I was hoping that playing another visual novel type game would finally make me sleepy enough to doze off and overcome insomnia. Turns out this is a very emotional game though, and I did not find it boring at all. I'm not really sure whether it deals with its heavy theme in an appropriate way (trigger warning), but I can't say it left me indifferent. Ironically, it had more choices than Frog Detective, too, and the handdrawn graphics looked much more professional and nice. One playthrough takes about 15 minutes, so it doesn't overstay its welcome, and a second playthrough can be significantly different with mostly new content (there are four differents paths/endings, I only played through it twice though).

Just beat Dishonored on PS4. This one's gonna make me seem like a total snob again as it's about another super popular and highly acclaimed game that I did not enjoy. I actually tried Dishonored when it was still fairly new but stopped playing it pretty soon as it was instantly off-putting to me for some reason. I figured that maybe I just wasn't in the right mood and would enjoy it a lot on my second attempt - I had the same kind of experience with BioShock, after all. Alas, I've beaten the whole thing now and can say with some certainty that I don't like this game. It's actually becoming a pattern with Arkane's games as I've had similar sentiments about Prey.

Briefly put: in my eyes the game is half-assed in almost every possible way. It starts with the story, which had immense potential, but is in the end very basic and cliched - the big twists were as predictable as it gets. The game has pretty interesting lore but the environments fail to sell it and turned out quite mundane by video game standards (I've been told that the DLC does a much better job in this regard). It has an original art style that has received a lot of praise and while I think the characters look great I can't say the same for the environments. The world is supposed to look a bit like a painting, so you have these seemingly hand-painted textures on often fairly basic geometry - IMO this was done too inconsistently and to my eyes it just looks like blurry textures on low poly environments, like in late 90s or very early 2000s 3D games. I could live with all of that but sadly I have the same kinds of problems with the gameplay.

The game is clearly inspired by "immersive sims" like System Shock 2, Deus Ex or - most notably - Thief. As a matter of fact the game feels a lot like Thief on steroids and you can find the traditional immersive sim philosophy in tons of details. All in all the game is rather linear but you can solve almost all problems in numerous ways, sometimes quite emergent ones. Traditionally many areas can be reached in a number of ways: disable a security device, turn into a rat to enter through a vent or "blink" (teleport) over a bunch of obstacles etc.. By the time Dishonored came out this wasn't impressive to me AT ALL and Dishonored doesn't even execute it very well. It feels more like level designers making sure that you won't get stuck depending on the skills you chose than a tool to genuinely allow different playstyles and strategies. It doesn't feel even remotely as satisfying to me as in Deus Ex or Bloodlines where this felt like a strong tool to convey my avatar's personality or genuinely different playstyles nor do the levels have the kind of scale like in Deus Ex where it felt like you were playing an entirely different level depending on which path you chose (incidentally Invisible War was accused of something similar - multiple ways to get into a room but you just get into that room either way).

Then there's the thing that I think that Dishonored's stealth gameplay generally sucks. Enemy behaviour is neither natural nor reliable - enemies often take weird paths and demonstrate unpredictable behaviour that makes hunting them unnecessarily stressful and literally made me savescum more than in any other console game (well, besides Splinter Cell 1 and 2 on the PS3). And I guess it's not just me since the loading screen repeatedly told me to save often. And frankly the level design is pretty bad in my eyes. Dishonored came out after a ton of Asscreed, Metal Gear and some Arkham games all of which had expertly designed stealth arenas that were like puzzles (well, Asscreed the least). Those games had tons of paths and vantage points that allowed you to plan ahead and strike with surgical precision - by comparison Dishonored is just noise. Here it's usually just chaos where you must identify that one moment when things just happen to line up nicely and then you have that tiny window of opportunity, go full YOLO and pray that another enemy didn't pull one of those unpredictable moves like leaning with his back against a railing instead of putting his hands on it. And the level design is consistently lacking - too few passages and obstacles all around. It has happened too many times that I ended up in a corner with an enemy approaching and no way out even though he was still quite far away. Nothing to crawl under, no vent next to me, no chandelier above me. Even once I had mastered blinking (again: teleportation) and had learned to quickly relocate past an oncoming enemy I felt that the level design did not offer even remotely enough options.

Surely I could have gotten a bit more out of the game by relying on some of the tools and abilities a bit more, many players would probably tell me that I could have e.g. stopped time or possessed an enemy in those situations but here's where some other issues come into play. The game triggers intense hoarders syndrome in me. Mana is a finite resource in this game and only two of your skills, blinking and some "detective mode" thing that allows you to see enemies through walls, won't permanently reduce your mana supply (unless you use them in quick succession) so I was very much inclined to primarily rely on those and failed to resort to the other abilities when I had to make a quick decision. Sure, one might say "git gud" and "it's hardcore game" and so on but well, Arkham's economy actively encouraged diverse ability use by using cooldowns instead of shared "mana" and in my eyes Dishonored would have just been a much better game by doing the same.

The other thing that annoys me about the game is what I have with many games with moral choices. Dishonored is the most fun when you slaughter enemies - there's actually quite a fun set of devastating and brutal abilities like summoning a rat swarm that eats enemies alive and even devours their bodies, there are also traps and you can hack security stuff to kill enemies instead of you. Yet, in this game that is fundamentally about an assassin with a skull mask who literally moves out to murder a series of VIPs and where there's almost always a badass dagger on the screen, you're encouraged to act peacefully. It is heavily implied that you get a better ending by keeping bloodshed to a minimum, all targets can be eliminated peacefully by doing optional objectives (and what sick mind would skip optional objectives?) and there's a checkbox for performing zero kills on the summary screen after each level. And soon I noticed that yeah, it's actually quite easy to get through the game just by knocking enemies out and using sleep darts on them so that's what I did. The result is that I got a game that is neither particularly fun nor fits the player fantasy implied by the friggin' box art. As a reward I got a good ending. In retrospect I totally should have played the game as a bloodthirsty killer, alas, the game did nothing to motivate me to do that - neither the objectives, the economy nor the rating system encourages to play the game in the way that is more fun and in my opinion that's just crappy design.

Yes, in hindsight I would have just not given a damn about ratings or the ending and just played the game in the way that is most fun but honestly: I just didn't know any better. At least I know what to do when I approach the sequels.

So yeah, I didn't really enjoy the game. And it sucks because I really wanted to like the game. It has a cool lore, some great characters, a nice style and atmosphere and so on but to me its execution is just pretty meh all around.

That's what's put me off from really getting into it so far, too. I mean I now know from others that it's not worth to restrict yourself to a non-lethal playthrough, but I think the disconnect between the bloodthirsty gameplay and the supposedly righteous "Count of Monte Christo" type avenger that I'm imagining the "hero" to be would still be a problem to me. With regard to the story, I thought there was no good reason for the main character to suddenly murder random guards left and right, but trying to not use anything powerful and deadly also was kind of tedious and exhausting. And in the end, I didn't even succeed at keeping everyone alive, because a guard I had put to sleep fell into a pool of water and drowned ... XD

Massive Chalice, Dec 26 (GOG)-This game had an interesting concept of creating bloodlines for heroes and then using those heroes to populate the various development buildings or join the five member adventuring party. Unfortunately it breaks down shortly after the concept phase.

The research and worker placement phase was initially interesting. But with only 3 different buildings to build on a total of about 12 spaces and uninspired combat upgrades to research after that it lacked any kind of depth. The combat also lacked depth and after two or three battles there is nothing left to see. The remaining 20+ battles are just repetitive. The final battle was a plus as that was unique. But the dozens of others were pretty boring.

The game seemed pretty easy on the normal difficulty. The first few years were a little lean and I had to field a 4 member party a couple times but even still the combat was pretty easy especially with lots of ranged units. I only lost heroes in battle when I got impatient and careless. I think in the entire game I only lost 3 heroes in battles. I seemed to have a pretty good resource engine going so I actually ended up wasting countless heroes who just sat around with nothing to do. And each of the new recruits had such high experience levels that at the end they were level 9 with a level cap of 10. With such high experience level it didn't really matter what traits my heroes had. Maybe on hard difficulty worrying about traits for bloodlines and party makeup makes a difference but here it didn't matter at all.

The game was fun but there was nothing that it really did well and combat was definitely a low point. I think the general concept could work but you need more things to do in the research phase and more engaging combat otherwise its just a 300 year slog.

Full List

Finished a few games lately:
- Deponia: A great point'n click. A specific section made no sense but other than that puzzles were generally well designed.
- Pillars of Eternity (and The White March): A great RPG but a bit too long for my taste (~80h I think). The lore and the world were a bit too detailed and it was a bit difficult to understand everything by times.
- Journey: I didn't like it at all. It was boring and it made no sense.
- Paw Patrol: On a Roll: I played this one with my 6-year old girl and it was the perfect game to start gaming. It was quite simple and easy but perfect for a beginner.

Full list here.

Reminds me of that time I accidentally killed a civilian in Hitman: Blood Money while I was fanatically going for a playthrough where nobody dies except the targets. After beating the Las Vegas mission there was a mysterious civilian death on the rating screen that surprised me a lot. Luckily I quickly figured out where that one came from: I had hidden an unconscious civilian in a freezer - as it turns out unconscious characters freeze to death inside those, lol.

I've just finished playing Silent Hill (1999) for the first time and I am blown away by how amazingly it holds up 20 years later. Yeah controls are kinda clunky and some voice acting is questionable (Harry seems too calm for someone in his situation) but everything else is made on such a stellar level that if it would've magically appeared tomorrow on Steam or GOG for 60$ I would not mind paying full price for it.

Sitting here and processing it while listening to "Not Tomorrow" from OST. Game is definitely 10/10.

Gotzendiener. The game begins with a hero battling a dark lord who's kidnapped a princess he plans to sacrifice in his tower. The hero vanquishes the demon but then drops dead. The princess is free and picks up the hero's sword, determined to escape on her own.

The game uses an isometric perspective as you control the princess, solving relatively simple puzzles to unlock doors and occasionally battling enemies. You have two magic spells - one in which you can project fire as long as you have a source near you, and another in which you can resurrect a dead enemy to fight with you. The fire spell is required in a few places. The other spell is kind of neat but totally optional. The game can occasionally be a pain to control because it uses Q*Bert like movement, but fortunately this is a pretty easy and short game, so I wasn't too put out.

The game is entertaining enough but it's low on content. I started playing it and then about 2-1/2 hours later I was done. I died once, at the end boss, and that was it. There's some combat but not a lot. A few puzzles but not too many, either.

The game was made by Gainax and they provide a couple of anime cutscenes, which haven't been translated from Japanese. From what I've read of the story beyond the initial concept, there's not much to it. Just some fantasy gibber jabber about sleeping gods or something.

The presentation is fine. Nothing extraordinary but also nothing wrong in graphics or sounds. I wanted to play this because the concept sounded amusing, and I had a nice time with it, but it felt like the video game equivalent of a snack. Seems to me they could have made a bigger, more ambitious sequel but perhaps it didn't sell enough in its time.

Mechwarrior 5 Mecenaries was my top 1 this year. Even better than Cyberpunk. EG7 better not to screw up the sequel.