Braveland

Exactly what it says on the tin. It's King's Bounty-lite. A hex-based turn-based combat rpg like. There's a minimal story, no interaction other than combat and commerce, and a few side-paths that are optional. The art is nice, the interface is useful, and the game does not require a ton of micromanaging.

It's a handful of hours (5 or so if you play all the battles). I would recommend this if you want a lightweight hex-battle game. Maybe an entry into the genre game or a change of pace. It does what it does well enough, and you can wrap it up in a short time and move on. Small download size, and runs well enough on a 5 year old laptop.

Braveland Wizard

More of the same. Plenty of recycled enemies and allies from the first one. Minor changes in gameplay between the two, but nothing really standout. No need to play in order, and if you want just one, just get whichever appeals more.

Wizard is easily the weakest entry, if only by a little.

Braveland Pirate

More of the same, but different. KB-lite stays the same. There's more map, there's a better progression than in Wizard. Your PC is now on the grid with your other units. Nice combat, great art continues. It's a bit longer than it needs to be, but not overly so. I would recommend this and first one, and only grab Wizard if you are looking for more.

Didn't try to rush through the game, tried to rush to get the maximum learning skill each character could get (had a magic party, remember that, paladin, monk, sorcerer, cleric) while getting as little experience as possible before then, so before doing anything else really, since learning skill boosts exp gain, so didn't want to lose any.

So you made your early & mid game hellishly hard in favor of a perceived easier late game? It's weird, but while Learning definitely helps, it's not all that important. By the end of the game, my Knight with 6 point in Normal Learning (class can't even get Expert) had 298K XP (lvl 77), while my Sorcerer with 9 points at Master level had 310k XP (lvl 79). Well for much of the mid to late game I was also getting a big learning bump from hires. Also by this point (end-game), XP didn't matter all that much as long as you had enough skill points for some critical grand masteries. I was hardly even using offensive magic, just buffs and healing and utility (teleports, flight, enchants, etc). There were times when I had enough XP to bump each of my character levels by 5-7 or even more but I didn't bother teleporting back to town for leveling up since re-buffing afterwards would've been a pain :). And when I finally got access to the Ancient Weapon and Light Magic skills, I did a level up binge that let everyone get those up to 10 immediately.

Always do that if the option seems to present itself. And not even necessarily to make the late game easier, but to have the most developed characters at the end. Cost/benefit analysis doesn't factor much into it, just how I always play, if I see a way to bump development by even one more step, I'll focus on that and may be more likely to give up on the game altogether (as the case was here) than to give up on that step and move on with the game.

By the end of the game, experience (and gold and everything else) flows like wine from a wine fountain. Plus it's not like there's a limited source of XP in this one - even if the quests can only be done once, if you wait long enough the monsters will respawn. So there isn't actually any benefit to hobble the early game like that. The only thing you're doing is shooting your own enjoyment of the game in the foot.

Deadly Premonition Director's Cut, Apr 29 (GOG)-I can see why a lot of people consider this a cult classic but those people are wrong. Even if you ignore the game crashing bugs which seemed to disappear in the 2nd half of the game the game itself is just bad. I honestly think this could have been a good game if you took out all of the gameplay elements and left only the story and dialog from the characters.

There were so many bad parts of the game. Everything about the driving experience was abysmal and there is a lot of required driving in this game. The combat was forgettable with poor aiming controls, only two enemy types the whole game, and multiple weapons with infinite ammo making it very easy. The combat was all just in York's head anyways until it suddenly wasn't. The side quests had obnoxious requirements to even trigger like chapter, time of day, weather, and location. There were frequent loading screens, annoying animations for opening doors (both car and building), bad camera angles, some awkward and bad animations especially during the QTEs, QTEs at all, a bad interface, a terrible map, some humorous translations (office room and kitchen room), and the PC was a condescending dick to most of the other characters.

The story itself was interesting until it got a little unhinged at the end. But it was never really decided if it wanted to be scary or funny as it frequently fell back on humor at the weirdest times. I would have really enjoyed a game just travelling around the town (assuming better driving) and interviewing people for the investigation. No need for combat that felt a little forced anyways.

I cannot recommend playing this. The story isn't that good and the rest of it is awful.

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Shadow Warrior 2013

It got a lot better as it progressed, but MY GOD IT'S LOOOOONG! XD

Odd bug at the end, when the camera pulls away, Wang's head is gone. :P At first I thought it was intentional, some spirit world intonation, but it's a bug. Couldn't find anything about in on line and changing the vid options didn't help. Oh well. :P

Now as soon as #2 goes WAAAAAY on sale I can start that.

The Swapper (2013) (Windows)
(thank you for the game, awalterj!)

This one was awesome. Puzzle-platformers are often a bit problematic for me, because as I love puzzles, I'm not very skilled for the plarformer part. This one is strongly focused on puzzles and you need to be quick only a few times. It took me about 6,5h to beat it.

I loved:
➾ unique gameplay - I haven't seen such concept before
➾ how gameplay is built into story
➾ graphics and music creating great atmosphere and feel of great sci-fi stories
➾ simplicity of puzzles, no long and complicated levels causing replays and frustration
➾ some of solutions are just brilliant and very satisfying
➾ teleports - you are forced to explore the whole spaceship, but it's not frustrating to come back somewhere to get some omitted elements

What I didn't liked:
➾ the game is not available for Linux natively here (it has Linux port on Steam) - but I understand that it's for technical reasons, GOG demands a bit more than Steam, who often offers crappy ports; by the way, the game runs properly under Wine
➾ the game needs graphic card, which made me to borrow another computer for a few evenings ;)) I suppose it'd be possible to optimize the game a bit, because it should be able to run it on Intel HD graphics and on better hardware CPU and GPU usage should be lower

All in all - it was really nice surprise and a lot of fun for me and my brain ;) Thank you, awalterj!

List of all games completed in 2018.

Really? I remember getting stuck in a couple of puzzles in the later part of the game and eventually quitting it. And I'm not afraid of a good puzzle game.


I got it for Linux and DRM-free with the Humble Indie Bundle 11, and I don't remember it particularly buggy... Unless the bugs were unsolvable puzzles near the end, of course. :P

Ad 1 - by simplicity I rather mean small and concise levels with solutions relatively easy to be implemented once you know it :D I died a lot and spent some time on some of them, but I find it still relaxing if making mistakes does not result in need of replaying a sequence of 100 actions...

And, to be honest, I've found the game relatively easy, I think 95-98% of orbs I've collected without help. And the hardest part were levels with red-blue-pink light, I think. They were closer to the beginning I think. I ommited some of them and was forced to go back later.

I still needed to check solution a few times (sometimes it was enough to realize that some item may be used another way), but it was much easier than that some damn dungeons from Grimrock or teleport chambers from Vaporum, where even walking with printed walkthrough was quite challenging for me ;)

Ad 2 - by crappy Steam Linux ports I don't mean this one (I didn't tried Swapper on Steam). I just mean that there are some technical requirements a proper Linux port must meet on GOG and there seems to be no such limitations on Steam.

Just finished Serious Sam 2. As far as I can tell it's considered the black sheep of the series, I myself didn't like it back when it was released. Well... it's still a pretty good shooter, actually. Croteam just seriously (pun intended) dropped the ball when it came to the style here.

I can see how they thought that going 100% for absurdity seemed like a good idea to them at the time, it was probably also an attempt to make the protagonist something more than a poor man's Duke Nukem, but clearly it was one big mistake. Theoretically story shouldn't mean much, if anything, in a game like this but frankly, turning the whole story into one big absurd joke and filling the game with ridiculous enemy designs did a lot of harm, in my eyes. In the end this whole hero fantasy from the first two games, especially in the first one, did matter a lot to me and fighting off "serious", if utterly over-the-top, enemies did contribute to the satisfaction of slaughtering thousands of enemies. I guess an even bigger problem are the new weapon designs, though. Even though it's functionally mostly still the same guns as in the first two games they just feel weaker and are less fun to use.

The level designs also feel a lot less refined and imaginative than in the original games. They are much more streamlined, they are worse combat arenas, there are far fewer of these psychological tricks that to some degree defined the level design in the originals. And of course they also suffer from the new style. What also sucks is that it feels like there's more unnecessary obstructions that you will run into while strafing and running backwards.

However, purely gameplay-wise it's still a pretty good and satisfying shooter, just utterly outclassed by its predecessors and, hopefully, successors (haven't played Serious Sam 3 yet).

What do you think is the target audience for the game?
I'm still looking for these kind to games to play with kids, but I find it really difficult to find something appropriate...

Demon Hunter: Chronicles from Beyond (2013) (Linux)

Rather mediocre example of casual/HOPA game. Good enough to fill 3h and provide some relaxing, distraction-proof gameplay, but I'd say it's a bit behind another games published by Artifex Mundi (actual developer studio is Brave Giant LTD).

List of all games completed in 2018.

Thimbleweed Park (PS4)

This is a point-and-click adventure game with a retro look and feel.

I found it very fun, the characters are interesting and puzzles are all logical and make sense. The difficulty level (on “Hard”) is just right: the puzzles are not too easy but not too hard either, I only had to use the Hint Line once and afterwards I felt like an idiot for not figuring it out myself.

It’s also quite long, I like to talk to everyone and interact with everything and solve all the puzzles myself so it took me over 19 hours (but I think at least some of that was me letting the game idle while I attended other business).

Playing a point-and-click adventure on a console is not optimal, but it still worked OK and I have no major complaints (it was perhaps just a bit slower to select things).

Overall it was a very enjoyable game and I’d recommend it to anyone who enjoys point-and-clicks.

Thanks for your opinion!
What type of humor does it represent? Could you compare to some other games perhaps?