Games that I completed last month:

Monochrome
A Kickstarter game where I was a backer. Can not really talk about this gaming without comparing it to Limbo. And while this has more things going like the story, visuals and the mechanism it is not really a difficult or long game. I think I was on the 15$ tier and quite happy with the end result, but I would not necessary buy another game from these guys.

Hitman Absolution
Have a had some sort of rough patch recently with gaming. Just not been able to properly enjoy any game. Well Hitman Absolution sort of changed this. Can say that I throughly enjoyed it and it gave me back little more interest in gaming again. Of course this is not a perfect game, but the complaints about the open-ness doesn't bother me. Stealthy enough and there as always really memorable levels. Just saw the new trailer for the new movie. Bit too much action-y, but sure I will watch it. The setting for these games is interesting and 47 is interesting character. Heck, I even liked the 1st movie!

Pitiri 1977
This is a shame. A indie puzzle platformer that is not really worth playing. Mainly because there is not much to it. I think it took something like an hour and there is nothing really memorable about this. Except for the bugs that is. Techinically I did not finish the game because the moronic super easy end-boss had invisible wall of some sort. Compared to the some Youtube videos of the same fight/ending and I had parts of the boss completely missing. Tried restarting/reload and whatnot. So, ended up watching the ending on Youtube.

Medal of Honor
Nothing much to write about this. Absolutely passable short military FPS. Decent enough plot and some cool levels. Like the "desperate" mission and the snowy hills. Naturally no idea/interest/time in the actual multiplayer part.

Tower of Guns
This surprised me. When it first came here I was not interested at all. I really like the rogue-likes, but just could not see how it would work in such old school FPS setting. Since the game has a randomly generated levels was sort of excepting some sort FPS platforming parts, which I absolutely despise. But nope, exactly as it says on the description. Reminded me obviously of the original Unreal Tournament, which still today is the number one multiplayer game for me. Except that this is a single player game with the said roguelike aspects. After beating the end-boss once I have only covered about 1/3 of the game, but don't think I have luxury of using more time on this. Then again there was another entrance to the end-boss room which I skipped.. hmmm..

Finished Deadpool.
Wow! This was the most fun superhero game I ever played. And the most fun game I played in a while. Of course this doesn't have the production value of something like Arkham but it's a great superhero game. I did not know much about Deadpool prior to playing the game, turn out he's someone who breaks the forth wall constantly in the comics and does the same in the game. It's hilarious! Oh, and Nolan North does a great job voicing all 3 Deadpool voices.

Anyway this video made me want to play it so here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSLoi3vM_Ag

Zombie Solitaire.

Wouldn't really recommend. Its decent enough, but doesn't offer much over regular solitaire, save making it easier. with 103 "levels" I was bored long before getting done. Luckily they implemented super cheat cards and I was able to instantly win the last 22 levels. (just the completionist in me wanted to finish, and I was able to).

repetitive music, sounds, gameplay, animations, and lack of intuitive features round out the cons of this one. Even for just passing time it isn't worth an unbundled price.

Deadlight

Where to begin...

In a not-zombie apocalypse, Assassin's Creed Park Warden parkours his way through obstacles that would leave any real person with shattered legs and muscles torn from their sockets, engaging in one cliche after another while fighting shitty controls, boring, absurd gameplay, and his biggest nemesis, water three inches higher than the top of his head.

The music is generic, the voice acting is mediocre at best (compounded by the main character narrating damn near everything), the 2-D platforming is idiotic in the face of other elements coming at you from the three-dimensional space, leaving you to wonder why the protagonist is such an imbecile that he's unwilling to do anything other than run in a straight line, leaping like a gazelle through ruined buildings full of not-zombies rather than simply going around, and the ending is an idiotic cliche that is meant to be profound but ends up being hilarious since the jackass is narrating, AT EXCRUCIATING LENGTH, while on the verge of being eaten by not-zombies.

And this game actually gets decent reviews...-shakes head-

Feb 13 - Grim Legends: The Forsaken Bride

The graphics are very well done. Gameplay is very smooth. Sound effects were good.

The puzzles weren't too hard and there are a lot more of them than hidden object scenes. There were far fewer hidden object scenes than other hidden object games we've played. It is closer to casual adventure with some hidden object scenes sprinkled in for good measure. Grab this object from here, go there and use it. You need to have a light, but the lantern you were just using two screens ago is gone from your inventory because it got used in the puzzle for which it was intended.

Used the hint system a lot, though, because some object puzzles were just nonsense.

Several hidden objects are mostly covered, making them very difficult to find. We hated trying to find a rather large shape only to find that 90% of it is covered and only a corner of it is visible. We hated trying to find shaped items among a scene filled with similarly shaped items.

We skipped the cutscenes and therefore can't comment about the storyline or voice acting that much. What we saw of them looked like they were animated very well.

Thankfully that kitten didn't mew the entire game or we would have quit. It was annoying enough as it was.

However, if you are into puzzle games and prefer less hidden object scenes, you will likely enjoy this game.

Life is Strange Chapter 1 (link to trailer)

If you are a fan of adventure games I highly recommend this one from Square Enix. It is a story about a girl who has the ability to rewind time and the choices she makes with this ability. Very good voice acting, story, and music in the game. The story draws you in and I am looking forward to the next 4 chapters.

I try not to give too much detail of the game as it is one to experience as you play.

My list

A Golden Wake
A refreshing point and click adventure (by refreshing I mean that it's not about paranormal stuff or serial killer investigation :)) with nice puzzles, great music score, very good story and some educational value.

I finished Castle In The Darkness this morning. I really enjoyed it, and I would highly recommend it, especially if you like challenging, retro platformers.

Myst (Masterpiece Edition)

Myst is a very peculiar adventure game.
It starts when you, a namelss passer-by, find a stange book that leads you... "elsewhere" with a simple touch. Problem is, you are now stranded.
As a lone traveller, you will move between several different unhabited dimentions, trying to understand what happened and how you can change your current problematic position.
The first thing you'll notice is undoubtedly the heavy surrealism that surrounds every view; the apparently common landscape is interposed with numerous "alien" objects, many of which need to be manipulated to progress on your journey.
The game gives you absolutely no clue on what to do: you just have to explore everywhere, keeping you eyes wide open for everything that may help you going further. Most of the times, the player needs to rely on his feelings and intuitions: the puzzles often have no logical consequentiality, yet the sheer amount of "coincidences" can give you an idea of how to correctly act. Sounds and images are your friends, and only by carefully analyzing them you will find your way.
Considering that Myst's charm -as it could be said about every adventure game- revolves around personal interaction, I will not say more to avoid ruining the experience; I will just add that its visual style, sound effects and almost complete lack of music craft a very specific atmosphere you will not find anywhere else.

One small notice: the Masterpiece Edition includes an hint system to help you when stuck, so even the most impatient gamers can give this game a try. I admit I used it a few times for a couple of seriously intricated puzzles (like that damn railroad dungeon)... :P

Time for the criticism: the game itself is very good, yet the technical aspect leaves much to be desired.
First of all, there are no keyboard controls: you need to do everything using the mouse, and considering that you need to continuously move from screen to screen the constant clicking can get extremely annoying.
To get things worse, the controls are also very imprecise: it will often happen to turn the wrong way beacuse the direction points are not very well implemented, and a few puzzles can reach levels of rage-quitting-grade frustration. For example, there is a notorious puzzle requiring you to play with musical notes: finding its solution is very easy -probably the easiest task in the whole game- yet setting it up is almost impossible due to the overly responsive "answer" panel. Despite perfectly knowing what to do -and in the most clever way, if I might add- I tried for more than an hour to get it right until my patience ran out and pushed me to download a save with the panel already activated. Yes, it is THAT bad, especially if your mouse has relatively high DPI like mine.
To add insult to injury, the game freeqently crashes, forcing you to restart from the beginning of the level each time. I suggest you to set the compatibility mode for Windows XP to drastically reduce their amount; everything else will just increase the problems or outright block the game (see Windows 98 mode).

My verdict? I can undoubtedly recommend the game, but I warn you that this edition will put your patience to trial. If you don't want to end like me, keep a low-sensitive mouse ready -you will need it.

Just went through the campaign in FEAR. It was pretty good, I thought. I admit, the combat was more fun and interesting than the plot was to me, but it was decently atmospheric as well. Good game, excellent shooter. Dunno if I'm gonna brave the x-packs like a project or not, still technically working on Bravely Default, after all. Well worth the cash at least and contributes nicely to GOG's shooter library.

Wow. I just finished Downfall, the first, dark, scrappy, broken, demented, twisted, brilliant release by Harvester Games, the people - two of them, I believe - who brought us Cat Lady. Which I still haven't played, though I did start it once.

Never has such a balky game been so extraordinary.

This may actually be a bad time to play Downfall, unless you're a completist: there's a reworked release coming soon, if the Intertubes are to be believed, which will involve more civilized graphics, full voicing (there's no voice acting at all in this original version), and smoother edges all around. Whether this is a good thing or not remains to be seen. Part of the charm of this rough game is that you feel like you're playing on the fringes of a rather bent mind, a disorganized and desperate personality drawn to bright colors and bold steps. I can't imagine this game being a whole lot more civilized, though I can picture it without a couple of reload-me bugs. It looks like the art is getting a complete overhaul, and I wonder whether that's a good thing. Well, time will tell.

The action starts outside the Quiet Haven Hotel, on a dark and stormy night. It's raining, heavily. You are Joe Davis, and your wife, Ivy, is having a breakdown. (There's a real Quiet Haven Motel in Pennsylvania, I see. Not going there, nope nope.) The road out of town is blocked, and there's no place to go this evening. You stop in, and book a room.

Things go south pretty fast, and soon enough you are searching for a path to escape through an increasingly surreal and disturbed landscape of locked rooms, macabre scenes, and muttered, threatening guests. The color palette is dominated by lurid greens, dark monochromes, and murky browns, all illuminated with splashes of bright red. The art is mostly right out of a sketchbook - you know in the horror serial killer movies how the lunatic so often keeps a stained spattered journal, drawn in terrifying swift strokes? It feels in Downfall like you are playing right inside that journal.

I won't address the plot, except to say that it is weird and not for the squeamish. You will do some terrible things or you won't be able to advance in the game. I mean, this isn't stuff you'll carry with you for the rest of your life, or anything, but it's all about icky and you're not playing a saint. There is grotesque disfigurement, and there's a liberal sprinkling of dead stuff around for atmosphere. There's a fair amount of crude nudity, of the highly-pixellated and unerotic variety, and the character animations are crude. In fact, all the game mechanics are crude. The inventory frequently stops working - sometimes hitting the scroll arrows, letting it close, and then re-opening it will solve the problem; there's a common bug where you open a recipe for a suspicious beverage and then can't close it. Save often, for these and other reasons.

Action is blunt, a few of the puzzles are extremely obscure, and it's easy to miss a few objects that you need, which will keep you wandering around. I had to consult a walkthrough on a couple of puzzles where I honestly would have been there all week without the solution occurring to me. There are also some important choices to be made before you're quite prepared for them. No choice will keep you from finishing the game - "winning" is not really a word that applies - but you won't have anything to go on when your first choice comes down. You'll be shooting in the dark, as they say. I looked at a couple of the endings, but I didn't feel the need to go back and replay chunks of the story to see them all.

When people talk about new voices in gaming, I like to think this is what they mean: this game is bold, powerfully uncommercial, deeply gross, and very disturbing. I'm delighted that it exists. It's a real triumph of story and voice over polish. If the coding were a couple of degrees south of where it is, the game would be unplayable. But it's all of a piece.

The writer and director and artist behind Downfall wrote the script at his night-shift job in a mental hospital, which may or may not be true - but that's the story, at least. He seems to have done it without ever paying any mind to his better judgement, and that makes the game remarkable. Technically it's a pretty short game, but I played it for a while, often in wandering confusion. I wish it were a little more interactive, since so much of the grimly-sketched background wants exploring, but it was a first project by a small team - it is what it is, and it's definitely off the beaten path.

My still-small list of games finished this year.

Full list:
Wonder Boy in Monster World
Need for Speed 4: Road Challenge

Finished the first Kingdom Rush game a couple of weeks ago. It's an enjoyable tower defense game; however, most of the strategy is in the placement of your towers. It can be quite challenging in the first few waves, if you have a bad layout. Recommended if you're looking for a good mobile game.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky - Finished this one this weekend. It's definitely the weakest of the three games, however, it still oozes with the atmosphere of the Zone. Although, many locations from the first game appear in this one, it's not to its detriment. However, the game seemed rather guided, there weren't too many side missions with substance. Many of them were fetch quests, nothing like the missions from Call of Pripyat. The ending was quite abrupt, but it did tie back into the first game.

So far:
Kingdom Rush: Frontiers
Kingdom Rush
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky

Procrastinated a bit with the updating, so here are the games I beat over the last few weeks:

6. Life of Pixel

Pretty cool platformer without much in the way of Story - just Pixel discovering his roots by platforming through levels based on old game systems (and PCs), from the ZX81 and Atari 2600 all the way through the Sega Genesis and SNES. In each level you need to collect all the diamonds to unlock the next level, and some levels have hidden collectibles which can unlock bonus consoles. Some levels get rather hard, especially since you can only take 2 hits from enemies before dying, and the ubiquitous spikes (and lasers and other traps) kill in 1.

The dev is a really cool guy too - receptive to suggestions in the forums, and even implemented a few of mine :)

7. Pixel Puzzles: Japan

This game has a lot of issues - lack of way to save your progress inside a puzzle, repetitive music, and worst of all picking up the actual puzzle pieces is an exercise in frustration - the game loves to hand you the piece next to the one you clicked on. Somehow this last issue is not present in the very last puzzle - weird.

8. F.E.A.R. Extraction Point expansion

More of the same F.E.A.R., with a few new weapons, and a non-cannon story. Nothing to complain about. After finding the base game too easy on Hard, I played this expansion on the hardest difficulty, and as expected some parts took a lot of retrying to make my way through them.

9. Nearwood: Collector’s Edition

A good Hidden Object Game / Adventure hybrid, though it had more puzzles than it did actual HOG scenes. Refreshingly, each of the HOG scenes actually made sense plot-wise - each had you find components of the objects needed to progress in the story. None of that "you need scissors but to get them you must also locate these 20 completely unrelated objects in this scene" that you find in other games in this genre!

And some of the minegame/puzzles were hard - I actually had to use the Skip function on a couple of them which proved beyond my ability.

The graphics were excellent, though I had to use a 3rd party utility (RadeonPro) to cap the framerate which would otherwise go to 400+fps unnecessarily heating up my craphics card. The plot & atmosphere, while not bad, were not quite as good as in the few Artifex Mundi games I've played.

10. Words for Evil

Great little "dungeon crawler" type game using finding wordfind (think Bookworm games) as the main mechanic. Tons of heroes/classes to unlock and level up, and the heroes' levels are persistent between games which is very nice.

11. Battle Group 2

Nice little "missile command" style game in which you are a gunner on a battleship taking down incoming planes, missiles, etc. Destroying the enemy and ranking well on a level gives you "barrels of oil" which are used to unlock new ships and upgrade them. The game is very short though - I beat it in under 2 hours, though without unlocking everything or getting the highest rank in each level.

I really liked the game and the way the developer created the levels in the style of each of the old systems.

Have to say that I was never able to complete all levels of the unlocked bonus consoles though. Some of them are quite hard (much harder than the original levels) and while I think that every level is doable, I got bored of trying over and over and over again just to get it right (because one mistake means that you have to start from the beginning of the level again).

In my eyes it would have been nice to add some savepoints in these later levels. Would also have made sense, because it is a future that was introduced at a certain point in platform games' history and so it should be in the game.