I always love weird, inventive games and that this one is in the underserved investigative genre makes it a must try for me. The issue with the genre is that cases are usually handcrafted and the process of solving them plays out like a linear adventure game with a small cast of characters. What makes Shadows of Doubt stand out is that it’s all procedurally generated. The city, the hundreds of people who live in it and of course the cases. The downside is that the procedural generation isn’t perfect, resulting in all kinds of issues, and there is a lot of jankiness in the mechanics. It’s one of a kind and great at what it does but you do have to put up with a lot of frustration.

It hasn’t even been that long since the last time I played a 4X strategy game but this one has been sitting in my queue forever and I bought it back then because it was designed by Soren Johnson. This one innovates on the usual Civilization formula in two key ways. One is that its setting is only the ancient and classical eras, hence its title. Two is that you’re constrained by the number of orders you can issue each turn. The intent is to streamline the gameplay and it works. At the same time, there are so very many rules and interactions to learn. I believe that this may well be the most complex 4X game I’ve ever tried. It’s honestly overwhelming. I can see why fans who love optimize everything to the smallest detail love this. Me, I just feel that I’m too old for this much micromanagement.

I can’t resist drive and deliver type games, so I decided to give this freebie on the Epic platform a shot. It’s something of a Grand Theft Auto-clone with an isometric perspective and set in 1959. Interestingly while you can step outside of your car, there’s no real combat and no one dies. The art and the world it depicts look great and it has solid voice acting throughout. It sounds like it should be good yet unfortunately it very much isn’t. Actual gameplay is frustrating due to the poor control scheme and the deliberate chaos it wants to encourage. Most of all, its makers seem much more interested in telling a story than making this an enjoyable game.

I like to try games of all genres such that I’d at least have a passing familiarity in them even if I’m never going to be an expert. One obvious lacuna in my ludography are military simulators. Well, here we have a submarine simulator that renders the German u-boats of World War II in such detail that you can walk around inside one in first-person view and press all of the buttons and switches yourself. It’s kind of insane and actually not as difficult to learn as I’d feared. I still didn’t spend that much time on it because it’s realistic enough that running a submarine in wartime is tedium most of the time, punctuated by brief moments of pure terror. But I sure enjoyed learning all about how submarines work and it is a very pretty game!

This was a free game, on Steam this time, and I’d never even heard of it before I saw the offer. It seems one reason why this was given away and then subsequently taken off the store is that the publisher lost the right to the IP. Unfortunately the offer was only for the base game and now you can’t even buy the many DLCs even if you wanted to. After playing this for a while, I very much wanted to because the prospect of having the extra ship types to experiment with is very enticing. The strategic layer is lacking and feels inconsequential. But the tactical layer is very strong and one of the best implementations of fleet-based starship combat I’ve seen.

The Remastered version of the game includes all three parts of the so-called The City Never Sleeps expansion. The story takes place after the events of the main game itself and features the characters Black Cat, Hammerhead and Silver Sable. Miles Morales gets a bit of character development as this does lead to his own game but Mary-Jane Watson unfortunately has a reduced role. She does tease Peter Parker over his relationships with other women but that’s about it. I disliked the power-ups Hammerhead gets to make his a worthy adversary here but the rest of the story isn’t bad. It does mean that the combat difficulty is ramped up significantly, enough to encourage me to regularly use gadgets which was no doubt the designers’ intention.

I’ve lusted after this game for years but this was another PlayStation exclusive. The original version was in fact never adapted for PC. We had to wait until after the Miles Morales sequel added a Remastered version of the first game before that in turn was released for PC. So it took a very long time for me to be able to play this, but at least it does have updated graphics and supposedly better performance. It was absolutely worth the wait as even after so many years, this is a top notch superhero action game.