Shadowgrounds

Looking at my GoG catalog, somehow this is one of the first games I've ever purchased here. Original Baldur's Gate predates this for me. Anyway, I've never gotten around to finishing it.

Shadowgrounds turned out to be loads of fun. It's a top-down shooter, and my experience with those has been spotty at best. Typically the controls are wonky. Somehow this gem actually has proper responsiveness for the genre. The dev is not someone I'm familiar, but this game runs well on modern systems with no real bugs. It somehow also comes with modding capability and a level editor. I think there was some thought put for its longevity, but it probably flew well under the radar for most people at the time to know that it even exists.

Anyway, just a random one, but still one of my earliest purchases here (for whatever reason at the time). Finally beat it last week or so.

EDIT: forgot to mention, the story and narrative is absolute crap. Guess that's to be expected from unknown shooters of this time. This game is fun strictly for the mechanical aspect and "some" worldbuilding.

Finally done with The Whispered World. I liked the story even if felt way too... I think the best word to describe it is melancholic.

That said some of point and click puzzle solving felt really stupid at times. And while I'm glad that it was something even the game acknowledges at points that doesn't make me any less annoyed. I like point and click adventures I just wish some devs didn't go out of their way to make some of these puzzles incredibly convoluted.

Venetica (Steam)

If "Eurojank" was an actual genre, then this game would be the poster child. It feels janky, the animations are a bit janky, and the boss fights are clumsy and just bad. Even running the game at high frame rates looks a bit janky at times because animations in the distance seem to run at only 15 fps no matter what. So, your game is running at 120fps, but the birds looks like they're about to drop out of the sky as they jump across the screen.

However, like all good Eurojank, there are actually some good ideas, and the game has charm. After a slow start, I really enjoyed it. It reminds me of games made by Spiders...such as Bound by Flame.
Scarlett is the daughter of Death and has unique game play abilities that set her apart. I strongly suspect that she is based upon Susan from the Discworld novels...I mean, she even has a poker as her first weapon at the start of the game- surely that's not coincidence.

The game can be competed with pretty much all side quests in under 30 hours.

If you read some reviews, they will tell you the PC version is a buggy mess. The game did crash a few times when loading in new maps, probably about 5 or 6 times over the 27 hours that I played it. I had one bug only, it prevented me from completing a small side quest. Other than that, I had no issues. There's a GOG review in particular that is wrong, it tells you that you must learn a skill to be able to defeat one of the bosses. This is not correct, I never learnt the skill in question- all you have to do is use a regular attack at the right time to deflect the bosses attack back.

The only real technical issue I had was not being able to run the game at native 4K. I could, but without any form of UI scaling I'd need binoculars to read any of the menus or text...even at 1440p. So I played at 1080p just so that I could actually read the UI and menus.

Control Ultimate Edition, Jun 5 (Xbox Game Pass)-I'm torn on this. The story was fun and weird but the combat was tedious and frustrating. The story and game world was a mix of tons of TV shows and movies like Twin Peaks, X Files, Fringe, Lost, Inception, Warehouse 13 probably more I forgot and even more I'm not aware of. The gameplay reminded me a bit of System Shock slowly unlocking new areas of the building and finding the various collectibles reminded me quite a bit of Her Story and Immortality because I was frequently reading or hearing messages out of order depending on when I found them. The graphics and voice acting were excellent and it was a lot of fun exploring all the nooks and cranies of the Bureau. But the combat was awful. Fights were wave after wave of enemy and they all played out the same: launch some debris, run around until the meter refills, maybe shoot the gun a few times, repeat until all enemies are dead. You have to constantly hide and dodge during combat because 2 hits was usually enough to kill you. Meanwhile there are countless enemies that soak up damage or worse continuously heal. And enemies would respawn in areas so you could never completely clear anything. Upgrades never really made you feel stronger and the whole combat experience was pretty bad. Everytime I died it felt really cheap and unfair and every victory and successful boss battle felt empty and lackluster because I knew there was another tedious experience on the way. The DLCs were good. The tie in to Alan Wake was ok but the Hartmann fight was too much. Foundation was ok too. So in summary game world and story quite fun, combat very bad.

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Technobabylon - 5/5

This is among the best point and click adventure games I have played. Aside from some well-designed & clever puzzles, it has great story-telling, charatcers, and world-building.

Especially the world-building. I would say that the best thing you can do with world-building is to hint about the greater universe outside of the immediate story. And Technobabylon does an excellent job of this. There is so much cool stuff in the periphery. It makes it feel as though you are in a real, living cyberpunk world where your story is just one cog of many in a giant cyberworld.

This is far from the best example - but I don't want to give away the best stuff. It's apparently possible in the game's lore to have neural implants that switch off pain receptors in specific parts of your body. It's only a single (missable) line of dialogue, but it's a cool lore wrinkle with some possibly fascinating implications. Not to say the more overt lore isn't interesting. Far from it. But, I really love the game's little subtle background details.

Anyway, the point is, this game is fantastic. It does a great job of storytelling and immersing you in its world. This is basically everything you could ever hope for from a cyberpunk adventure game.

Apotheon

Ancient Greeks gods are fucked-up and this game really captured it.

I especially really enjoy the last stage, the climb to Zeus. I feel this part really captured the madness of human vs god.

Perhaps the battle control can be more intuitive as sometimes the game didn't feel snappy enough. The switch in-between battles with melee, ranged, items and potions often feels complicated. I played this with gamepad but in game I wonders if I should just use mouse and keyboard to get the aiming of ranged weapons better.

Also worry not Athena, you are not forgotten.

For now, Helldivers 2. lol. I cannot justify spending more time in a game that I might be restricted from accessing in the future. A shame. It's such a fun game. I might come back but with the Elden Ring expansion and Once Human coming up, my gaming time is fully stacked for the coming months.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

Epic Games

21 hours 57 minutes

70% completion

2d title of the year finished and what a ride it was.
Actually, i found the action portion near the end a bit overwhelming now and then. Still great visuals, soundtrack, puzzles and of course Lara

Solid Recommendation

List

Crusader: No Regret. This is essentially the same as the original game, but they've added some extra stuff like movement options, more items, enemy types, etc. They stripped out most of the Wing Commander-like interludes with you chatting up everyone back at the base, so now you just talk to a couple of people before heading out.

I liked it but I think I prefer the original a bit because this sequel feels more like an expansion pack than a true sequel. It's like Crusader Secret Missions. "Oh, you beat the original game? Well, try this out, tough guy!" The missions are harder, with the takeaway being that you need to be far more careful about leaving cover to do anything and save scumming is a good idea. Oh, you missed that camera. Oh, the camera or turret was shielded and you didn't take out the generator powering the shield. Oh, you missed a laser eye. Oh, you stepped on a trap. You missed another laser eye. It turns the missions into a slow grind rather than the more freewheeling feeling from the first game. And maybe I'm imaginging things, but it felt to me like the aiming wasn't as sharp this time. So many times I would try to aim in the direction of one of those tiny targets only to burn ammo because the shots were actually way off, and the targeting cursor seemed to have a smaller window. I had to start thinking far more often in terms of keeping things simple and trying to aim in the four cardinal directions as often as possible because the diagonals were a bother.

I still enjoyed it because it still has all the stuff I liked from the first one, but I just felt it wasn't mixed quite as well.

Finally after many, many years I have worked my way through the original Fallout. I loved Wasteland when it came out way back when, played it on my C64, but never got to Fallout even though I even own the disc from back in the 90s. Fallout was fun, and I'll be looking to jump into Fallout 2 sometime in the not too distant future as well.

Dead Space Remake, Jun 10 (Xbox Game Pass)-A really good remake and a really good game. It's probably the best way to play Dead Space. Unfortunately having played the original most of the twists and scares were wasted on me. Still it's a worthwhile play especially if you haven't played the first one. There are some tweaks to the levels and plot which kept things mostly fresh and I did appreciate the retooled weapons particularly the flamethrower for crowd control. I think the game was quite a bit more difficult than the original because I seemed to be using a lot more ammo than I remembered and I never once had to backtrack for pickups because my inventory was full because I was constantly expending tons of ammo. The game was a little buggy crashing pretty regularly about once a session until I updated some drivers so not really the game's fault. Also, there was a frequent issue with recognizing keyboard button presses for things like stasis and kinesis. It wasn't a showstopper but it was annoying. I had a lot of fun but I do put it below The Calisto Protocol only because I couldn't experience the story again for the first time while The Calisto Protocol was all new for me.

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Congratulations.

It's no easy task to play that game today

Dex

One from the previous GOG Giveaway back in 2022 in a sale overwhelmingly named "The GOG Sale"

On the gameplay, we can choose 1 out of 3 style of playing with melee, weapon or stealth. I choose melee at first as the lack of ammo means you have constantly spend money to buy ammo. The stealth route is also possible but if you really trying to grind you have to killed all the enemy as they provide the XP when killed. But after past the half mark of the game the brawling part became too easy as we became over powered with all the implants and skill upgrade. The only time it became harder is at the last part of the game when I have to mass brawl with 8 enemies at once.

The hacking part is a dual stick shooter. My mistake is trying to tackle the harder ones in early part of the game when I still haven't spare upgrade points to hacking abilities. Takes times and resources this way. Like the melee skill, upgrading them made the whole game easier.

The story itself is nothing to write about when I already got a feeling where it was headed past the half mark of the game.

But all in all this is a good game, a solid choice for GOG to giveaway and actually if anyone bought it when it was in deep discount they would have little complain.

Oof, after several extremely busy months at work I've finally found some time for gaming again. One game I'm really looking forward to play (and which I bought already) is Outcast: A New Beginning. But since it's been over twenty years since I beat the first game, I figured that it would be a good idea to do another playthrough of that one first. And of course I did that through its remake: Outcast: Second Contact. Specifically playing the PS4 version on PS5.

I'm quite sure that Second Contact is the best way to enjoy the game today but this remake (or "remake") is a bit of a mixed bag. The game hasn't been improved as much as it could, some of the "improvements" are questionable and many things that should have been reworked have not been touched. Oh yeah, and specifically the intro is just awful. They replaced the fancy CGI intro from the original game with a shoddily animated and unbearably boring 2D montage.

The most obvious update are the graphics which now use modern technology. It doesn't have the fidelity of a modern AAA game but especially the landscapes are very nice to look at. Funnily the level geometry seems to be practically unchanged, which gives the game a peculiar look, but I find that very charming and I think it works great in a game where you explore an exotic alien world. Some of character models also look pretty great, even though I don't necessarily love their new designs. But yeah, I think in terms of graphics the remake is pretty strong.

But here's the thing: like in the case of many other remakes this one still runs the original game under the fancy new dressing. I don't mind that kind of approach, it also worked amazingly well for the remakes of games like Halo and Shadow of the Colossus. However, in this case the underlying game is still pretty rough in many places. The jumping physics are off, climbing doesn't always work, explosions still have extremely wonky behavior and there are still gamebreaking bugs in there. One important story sequence glitched out completely and the only reason I was able to proceed was because I could kill enemies who spawned underground using glitchy explosive weapons. Or an important NPC ran into the ocean and became completely inaccessible (though he didn't drown).

And the developers did update the game in several places but I'm not sure there's a single change that I categorically consider an improvement. The wonky crawling has been replaced with a crouch which gives you fewer stealth options. They just removed the optional first-person perspective, instead adding free vertical aiming and a lock-on system to the third-person perspective - but the lock-on is glitchy and makes it literally impossible to hit moving enemies (and they move a lot!). They added a sprint but sometimes the dude fails to start running but still uses up stamina. You can still ride certain alien animals, and their behavior seems to have been greatly improved, but these animals can't jump anymore which makes navigating the first big world far more tiresome than in the original game. Yikes.

A lot also changed on the UI and this is where things get really controversial in my opinion. The original game was famous for its organic design: instead of quest markers and whatnot you had to ask NPCs if they've seen another guy and they'd tell you the direction or point at the NPC in question. Now all named NPCs are visible on the map (once you've found them at least once), making the original game's cool feature almost unnecessary. The game is also famous for teaching you tons of alien terms and now they've added "translations" in parentheses - again: a feature that directly hurts one of the game's strengths. Luckily it can be turned off. And also stats that (I'm pretty sure) used to be only accessible through dialogue, like your reputation and enemy strength, are now actually visible in the inventory. What they did not bother touching at all, on the other hand, is the inventory which is still difficult to navigate and especially fails to provide easy access to items that you want to use often.

And audio has apparently been left entirely untouched. It's okay for the music because the soundtrack was a high-quality orchestral soundtrack in CD audio quality that sounds as good today as it did back then. The game also still uses the original voices which I think is mostly great but they do have a low audio quality and I'm sure they could have improved the sound with a bit of filtering. What kinda sucks, however, is that the SFX seem to be unchanged as well. The guns sound like ass, the environments sound pretty dead and so on. Eh.

So the remake isn't nearly as good as it could have been but still: it isn't significantly worse than the original game in any area and as I said, I think it's the best way to enjoy the game now.

But is the game enjoyable today in the first place? I think it is! Of course it has aged and it won't blow anyone away anymore after two decades of AAA open-world games but there is still a magic to the game. The plot and the main characters are bland (though the hero's smartass lines are still funny IMO) but it is still a joy to learn about the Talans' culture and mythology. Overthrowing a dictatorship on an alien planet via guerrilla tactics is still satisfying. And the game's organic design based on dialogue and notes rather than millions of markers is still remarkable in my opinion.

Second Contact still isn't a modern game and will be off-putting to most players who grew up with more modern titles but for those willing to experience an old title again (or for the first time) it's pretty great.

Fixfox

Completed after 18 hours. The game is very enjoyable in graphics and music, and good in the story. But puzles become repetitive and abuse of the same gameplay one time and another, find four places to put a mindcard to solve a puzle and then change to another place, and repeat, in general lines.

Nevertheless, the travel was good and i give it four stars. **** :)