You made me wishlist it! Also, it's worth mentioning that it was a Europe only release at the time so the digital edition is a late "world premiere".

I haven't finished nothing this year, but I'm close to the end of Metro Last Light, awesome game, way better than Metro 2033 so far.

Technobabylon, Feb 6 (GOG)-This was a really good game. The conspiracy and mystery of the plot were excellent. I felt the plot stumbled a bit trying to bring it altogether at the end though. The puzzles were mostly good but a few I had to fight the game on. Voice acting was pretty good too. I think this becomes my favorite Wadjet Eye game and I've played quite a few.

Full List

Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris

The puzzle design is pretty good, but it's weird that they designed it almost as a kind of looter shooter. You collect gems by exploring and redoing the various tombs. These you then use to unlock chests of various levels found across the open world. E.g. at the end of tombs you can find the highest tier chests, so you can actually grind tombs if you want to get better weapons and equipment. It's very weird for a Lara Croft game. Quite fun, but I was glad when it was over (in part perhaps because it ran very sluggishly on my system)

Werewolf - The Apocalypse: Earthblood (PS4)

I believe this game is based off a Tabletop game, I've never played or read anything about the tabletop so all my knowledge of the lore and story comes from this game. Anyway W-TA:E (What an acronym) is a game where you play as, you guessed it, a werewolf. As far as I'm aware this is one of only a few games where the sole playable character is a werewolf, I can only think of two others off the top of my head and I wouldn't consider either of them great games. The story (from what I gather) is you're part of a pack of werewolves, protecting some Nature Spirits and the environment in general from the evil oil company, ENDRON (I'm surprised they can get away with having a name so similar to ENRON, an actual energy company), who are controlled by some evil deity/entity/spirit called the Wyrm, which wants to annihilate all life on earth. The core mechanics of the game is split into 3 forms: Human, where you can interact with electronics, perform stealth kills and talk to people, Wolf, where you can crawl through vents and distract enemies by barking and Werewolf, where you basically turn into a 9ft killing machine covering the walls with blood. The Werewolf form has an Agile Stance which allows you to dodge more easily, the Tank stance (Forgot the real name) where you move slower but gain the ability to tank damage and make stronger attack and the Frenzy Stance, which you can be in for a small amount of time, that allows you to move fast, tank damage and have strong attacks. The Werewolf sections are where it turns from stealth to hack & slash as you literally soak up bullets and rip people apart.

The game has 2 small open world areas which lead to additional areas where the missions take place. You can do side quests in these open world areas, but these are usually "Find these spirits", these spirits are of course tiny and invisible unless you use your wolf senses, which make it just one long scavenger hunt. Speaking of spirits, they are your main method of improving your skills. The spirits hang around plants and old artefacts that are scattered around the levels. These spirits grant you skill points that allow you to gain new skills, increase the power of skills or give you buffs.

In missions you will usually move between room to room, certain rooms will have enemies in them. What you're meant to do is use stealth to takedown enemies silently, sabotage doors so enemy reinforcements arrive with lower health, find a terminal to disable camera's and turrets and then either sneak out quietly or turn into a Werewolf and kill the enemies you've reduce in power. Taking down enemies silently increases your Rage, which you can use in Werewolf form to use abilities.

Now forgive me, but I'm going to proceed to rant about the stealth sections for a bit. First of all, the enemy AI has a few issues, one of which is a lot of enemies tend to stare at walls. One level had 7 enemies in it, 4 of them were just leaning back staring at walls. Secondly, enemies rag doll when you knock them out, problem is rag dolls are bouncy... and they no clip, so on several occasions I have knocked out enemies only for them to noclip through the barrier their body should have dropped behind and instead the body is spotted by a patrolling enemy. Thirdly, the most useful thing during stealth is to take out the strongest enemies first so you don't have to deal with them if you get spotted and have to fight as a werewolf. Problem is you can't stealth takedown the strongest enemies, they survive being shot in the head with a crossbow and you can't break their neck from behind. Finally, and most blatant of all is the fact it's a lot easier to just transform into a werewolf straight away. The vast majority of enemies you face are killed in 1-3 hits, they tend to group up and the werewolf is so large he can easily hit 3 or 4 enemies per attack. The combat has very little challenge to it even on hard mode, provided you destroy the turrets and mech's as soon as possible (There's an ability that can take them down in about 2 seconds) you don't have to worry about gaining rage or sabotaging doors. There's no penalties for not doing rooms stealthily, as the enemies in the room 20ft away don't hear you or prepare for your arrival. It just feels like the non werewolf sections aren't really utilised enough, though I guess most people would prefer a werewolf game to be mostly killing things as a werewolf.

Seeing as I've started ranting, I will now move on to the story. You play Cahal, a loner werewolf who struggles to connect with his daughter, deal with rage issues and is the only competent character in the entire game. Your allies are only useful as tech support (There's a lot of hacking terminals in this game) and they mostly seem to bumble around or end up outmanoeuvred by the enemy, an enemy that isn't that much more competent. An enemy who doesn't staff their own security offices. One of them actually walks up to you without a weapon and antagonizes you despite the fact he's seen you literally just rip 200 people to shreds over the last twenty minutes (Guess what happens to that guy). The Main Antagonist is some all knowing President of the company who taunts you over the intercom and whose plans amount to "I'm going to let the main character slaughter everyone, then I'm going to reveal I planned for him to slaughter everyone, reveal a trap then move on to the next location". The story as a whole is severely lacking. Off the top of my head, only one character (possibly two) have any sort of development, Cahal is not one of them. Cahal has two emotions, annoyed and angry, he treats other ally's poorly and his ally's go along with all his shouting because he's stronger than the rest of the allies put together. Cahal has one line of dialogue which equates to "If you work for an oil company, even if you don't know their secretly evil, your soul is forfeit and you deserve to have your jaw ripped off by a werewolf", which is the sentence that explains why you shouldn't feel bad about the thousands of people you kill. The ending is a development I find incredible that the studio decided to go along with, followed by a player choice. Neither choice has a satisfying ending, both of which also end on a cliff-hanger.

Don't let the rants put you off, I just had to get that out of my system. The gameplay is mostly decent, although the stealth isn't required, it's still challenging to try see if you can takedown every person in a room silently. And if you like the idea of turning into a furry killing machine, ripping people to shreds to a killer metal soundtrack, then this is the game for you. If you're one of those people who won't play a game because it has a particular political message (Grow the f*ck up, it's a video game) this game has a very strong environmentalist message and has lines of dialogue that often sound like they belong in an Extinction Rebellion video, though it barely talks about the environment after the first half hour or so. I'd recommend the game, but not at it's current price, I'd wait for a sale before buying it.

I did another bunch over weekend.

First Mega Man 7. It is part of the PC Legacy Collection and so far this was the hardest of all for me. I am not good with these games where you have to learn patterns and be quite precise to nail them. Previous 6 games had rewind option and save anywhere so I was rarely punished and could play in reckless manner. This one had only autosaves in certain checkpoints so I had to play much more carefully. Took me time to get used to but eventually I got better. It still took mu quite longer than previous games in the series but it was mostly fun and it was still only several hours (some 6 I think). It is first change of engine since start of series and it doesn't look bad at all. Overall I think it was one of the better ones.
6,5/10

Then there was another one I started and finished the same weekend and that's Octodad: Dadliest Catch. Silly wobbly physics game, about octopus knocking things over and pretending to be normal human dad and husband. I enjoy the sillines and the humor and had fun with it. While I am not fan of games as Surgeon Simulator, I like it here, as it nicely meshes with protagonist being octopus and with the absurdity of people barely minding you kick stuff over and break it constantly. Only thing I didn't like much was the hospital short story, that was making nod to Surgeon Simulator and it wasn't something I wanted from this game. I did only basic playthrough (plus secret level and shorts) but I wasn't hunting for ties or trying for best times as that is not someting I wanted from the game.
7/10

Last we finished Murder by Numbers. It is combination of nonogram puzzles and detective visual novel. While we like both nonograms and detective games and don't mind visual novels, I don't think it meshed here well. It is more of a puzzle game with story than story games with puzzles as there is a lot of those puzzle and they are not skippable and one has to spend a lot of time on it. I feel like the puzzles interrupted the flow of the story a lot and at the same time, there was perhaps bit too much story, who played it for those puzzles.
Also the story is quite mediocre and not that great written and there is not that much detective work involved. Characters are not too memorable or interesting and I didn't enjoy the script much. It was just not too deep and I disliked frequent mood switches, from serious, to comedic and right back to serious, as if nothing happened. Honestly, most fun we had with the game was with making up silly voice for the characters and that was not really game's credit. We did all puzzles and everything story related and it took us over 30 hours, but we also fooled around with voices and stuff a lot so it can be likely done much faster.
5,5/10

Full list.

I played and finished Indiana Jones Emperor's tomb this year and I was surprised how good it was. Especially after some widescreen mod. It surely had annoying moments and sometimes hitting enemies was hard but sure was a great action adventure or perhaps fanboyism hit in that game.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Jan 8th)
Hitman 3 Story Campaign (Jan 28th)
Street Fighter V Story Campaign (Jan 30th)

Just Cause 2 (Feb 13th)

Quantum Break (March 22nd)
Astro's Playroom (March 25th)
Maquette (March 26th)
Bugsnax (March 30th)

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (April 15th)
Dark Cloud (April 23rd)
Paper Beast (April 26th)

Mortal Kombat X (May 5th)
Control Ultimate Edition (May 29th)

Oddworld: Soulstorm (September 10th)
A Plague Tale: Innocence (September 15th)
A Way Out (September 23rd)
Untitled Goose Game (September 26th)
Final Fantasy XV: Episode Ardyn (September 27th)

Star Wars Squadrons Story Campaign (October 5th)
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (October 14th)
Deathloop (October 18th)
Little Nightmares 2 (October 24th)
Spider-Man: Miles Morales (October 25th)

Yakuza: Like A Dragon (November 26th)

Just Cause 3 and Air, Land & Sea DLC (December 28th)

Finished Dead Effect and Minoria. Meh to both.

Finished Littlewood a few weeks ago, I enjoyed it as a mindless grind while catching up on youtube/watching streams. Enjoyed building up my town and left it with a nice final build.

Finished Escape Goat yesterday. Was enjoying it as they were nice relaxed puzzles but then the end became time=based and hectic, with the last level having me die a ridiculous amount of time (I ended at 431 deaths, the vast majority from that level). Still, I would pick up Escape Goat 2 if it goes on a decent sale.

Batman The Telltale Series, Feb 11 (GOG)-With the exception of Puzzle Agent I don't think there's been a Telltale game I didn't like. Even Puzzle Agent wasn't bad. Batman was good providing an interesting origin story for the caped crusader. It plays like the other recent Telltale games which I think is fine which means the focus is again on story with few puzzles and some QTEs. I thought the story was pretty good and the voice acting quite good too. My only complaint was the frequency of stuttering especially when loading scenes. It happened often and took me out of the game.

Full List

Control Ultimate Edition (XSX)

For this game it's easiest to get the single thing that I really didn't like out of the way first. The boss fights are horse-shite. Remedy don't have a great track record anyway for boss fights, they mostly tend to be the gimmick variety- aim at the single vulnerable spot, run around in the dark plugging in power cores to make the boss vulnerable etc. Call me dull and boring but I just prefer straight forward fair fights against a tough opponent that you have to wear down using all your abilities. To be fair to Remedy, From Software are the only dev that have ever made bosses I like, and even they make the occasional stinker.

Luckily, there's actually not many story bosses, and a few more optional bosses (screw you Former and having to beat you twice). Everything else in the game was excellent. It has that Remedy weird sort of story telling which is more like something David Lynch would do, rather than Japanese random weird.
As always Remedy are the masters of being able to tell a movie like experience, but without jerking you around with cut scenes and forced idiot scripting. There are a huge amount of documents, videos (don't miss the Dr Darling videos!) and audio files and songs to find to flesh out the story at your pace or even ignore most of it. I wish more game developers followed the Remedy style instead of the Naughty Dog style.
I also played both DLC which were good quality, especially Foundation. AWE was okay and ties into Alan Wake, the two games are in fact part of the same world.

Whilst the bosses didn't suit me, the regular combat was great, fast paced and encouraged you to use your wide range of skills to fit different enemy types and your play style. There's no difficulty levels and some parts get very hectic, but even when I died I always quickly succeeded with a change of tactics.

Technically it's just fine. It ran at 60fps which is why I waited until now to play it- my PC would struggle with this game. But the XSX handled it no problem. There is the choice of 30 fps with ray tracing...I tried it for comparison, but no thanks. Honestly the games fake reflections in the 60 fps mode look so good anyway that I cannot justify the performance hit in this type of game.

Highly recommended. Out of Remedy's last three big games, Control has the best game play without a doubt. However I still rate the story and mood of Alan Wake a class above it, as well as the underrated Quantum Break. One of my favorite developers.

So, I just beat the main campaign of Anno 2070 called The Virus.

It's one of those games where the entire campaign is basically a tutorial so on one hand I've barely scratched the surface of Anno 2070, on the other hand I feel like I've basically seen everything because throughout the campaign you will be familiarised with all the mechanics and, if you feel like it, can build virtually everything there is in the game (with a few presumably small exceptions) - it's just that there's effectively no pressure at all. There are some scripted crises that don't require quick action from you at all and when enemies appear they usually won't attack and will just wait until you feel like attacking them. In the last mission or two the enemy started "attacking" by sending one or two units at a time which is honestly just a gesture.

So, I don't have all that much experience with city builders, most of it comes from the first Tropico and Anno 1602 - this is only the second Anno game I've ever played. The first striking thing is how little the game has really changed since 1602, even though this one has a pretty bold setting for the series, being set in the future. The foundation is still the same: you get more money the larger your population is and to really grow the population you need to make it level up to higher social classes - when you reach a new social class you have to face more complex demands and also get access to the required buildings which lead to more complex production chains. Honestly, Anno's core isn't all that complex and like e.g. The Settlers it IMO only makes sense if you have to face aggressive opponents and have to optimise the growth process, otherwise it's just pretty darn boring (though still satisfying in a way - almost meditative). As I mentioned above, you really don't get that in the campaign and the campaign just isn't well-designed in any other way. The first couple of missions are kinda fun because you keep constantly discovering new stuff and the story has a decent pace - I actually beat what seemed like two thirds of the campaign in a single day. But then, as you reach the final levels that require you to go through a full cycle from zero up to endgame stuff for all three factions, I suddenly ended up playing the same map for two or three days and it just got utterly boring.

The campaign tells a story involving the three factions in the game. There are the corporate asshole Tycoons - who brutally exploit what's left of the Earth just so they can eat hamburgers and drink champagne - and the organic tea-drinking hipsters called the Ecos. The third faction stands out in that it can only be used on top of the other ones because it requires resources that only the other factions can provide, so it's more like an endgame stage for the other ones. This faction, the Techs, can "do science": they can develop upgrades for your units or even your entire "civilization". Oddly enough they can even do meta research that unlocks stuff for your entire player profile and will carry over between missions / maps. Oh yeah, they can also build underwater bases but their only real purpose seems to be so the scientists can eat algae, which is just ridiculously disappointing (though apparently the expansion Deep Ocean addressed this exact issue). Eventually these three factions face a common menace that is anything but menacing. Honestly, I think the style of Anno 2070's sci-fi is just silly and didn't resonate with me at all. It's neither exaggerated enough to be really fun nor is it serious enough to feel like a legitimate "what if" scenario that makes you think.

Anyway, so I guess mechanically Anno 2070 only really stands out through all those attached systems and meta mechanics, most of which you won't really witness during the campaign. And so far I feel that they are stuff that unnecessarily complicates the game without making it more interesting. Modding specific military units is just not something I want to do in a builder about managing cities and production chains. And the entire process and the interface involving research are just an awkward mess IMO and they stand out as something that was forcefully added to the formula. The pinnacle of absurdity, IMO, is the profile-wide research. I would see the appeal if those unlocks required you to complete certain exclusive goals that require you to start over and encourage you to build very different cities every time. As it stands you can just build a stable society and unlock and even apply everything in one session which would be an incredibly long and boring process. It's kinda dumb. Anno 2070's meta gameplay aspirations don't even end there, though. On top of that there's a ton of achievements and challenges that don't appear to unlock anything too meaningful, there's an online voting system that grants all players certain bonuses depending on who wins and there's a little challenge every day and even some periodically changing missions (though I'm sure they've been on a loop for a long time now and the developers should have just made them selectable like any other single mission by now, IMO - kudos for keeping things working, though).

Anyway, so far Anno 2070 seems very disappointing to me. As a city builder it's disappointingly banal and depressingly similar to the original Anno 1602 and I feel that they missed a ton of opportunities here. I'm not sure if I should move on to the actual challenges which I will presumably find in the single missions or just move on to the next game in the series.

I would very gladly check out the content from the Deep Ocean expansion, alas, for whatever reason that one just doesn't work. I entered the addon's serial and the game just refuses to install the expansion. Screw Ubisoft.

The Longing (2020) (Linux)
(thank you, Doc, for the key!)

My first thought was "Walter Moers". I love "The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear" and I've read most of his books. He has incredible, unique art-style – and Longing is drawn a bit similar. But this game is much more than only interesting visuals.
Actually the game is a puzzle – but the mechanics is quite unique. The main resource is time. You need 400 days to complete the main quest except... well, except it's not all the truth. This game lives its own life, time passes with or without you. You can make more or less effort playing the game.
I think I've invested less then 10 hours of actual gameplay (not counting hours spend with the creature by my kids) and I think I've discovered most (almost all) secrets and reached different endings. I've made my own maps. I often read a book when playing the game. I've also used some sophisticated tactics to minimize my own effort and maximize the result. It's a really different kind of puzzle – and I really like it!
You may like the game – or not. But it's obviously a game you'll remember forever. One of its kind.

List of all games completed in 2021.

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor

Like the Tomb Raider reboot before it, it's a game I got years ago and kept postponing playing it. And, like it, once I actually started playing, I got hooked until the end.

It's a very fun Assassin's Creed clone with Batman Arkhanesque combat. The game is divided in two maps, and the story seems completely segregated between then, which results in very abrupt narrative moments. The game also felt very truncated after the second boss, which makes it end on a whimper.

The Nemesis System does create some very fun gameplay elements and moments, though once you actually engage it and spend some time actively toying around with it, it starts showing its limitations very quickly. Still, it made for a much more enjoyable ride than the somewhat similar but way more limited Mercenary System in AC Odyssey. In fact, it made the flaws, annoyances and limitations of it way more obvious (like how the level grind in Odyssey bottlenecks the mercenaries above you so that every couple of level ups, you get visited by the next guy above you as soon as you get some bounty on your head). It's a shame Warner patented their system.

The maps felt the right size as not to be overly long to explore quickly, but I felt a lack of safe areas to visit and walk around. The enemy respawn rate also is insane and get's annoying very quickly.

Overall, a solid game and a very worthy ride. I'll be visiting the DLC missions very soon.