I last played Spintires years ago. Since then the series has grown from strength to strength with a dedicated fanbase. This current version of the game has a whopping 18 seasons worth of additional DLC content. I noped out of the previous game before too long because it started to feel too much like real work. The new version has so much more content, a bewildering variety of vehicles and customizable options for them, larger and more complex maps and that means lots more work to do!

I’m a huge fan of the storytelling games made by Inkle and what’s more this is a prequel to Overboard! so I just had to get it. I wasn’t too fond of the earlier game as I found it too short but I did like the story and the characters. This game too has rather little content but the effective playing time is lengthened by it being significantly more difficult. It’s difficult enough that I would consider it a puzzle game rather than just a storytelling game.

I generally dislike online games but this is free and very popular, so I thought I should at least check it out briefly. After all, I rather the idea of a wuxia action game and it’s not like any Western game developers are going to offer something decent in that genre. Now more than fifty hours later, I’ve still playing and nowhere near the end. As far as I know, the main quest isn’t even complete yet as updates are still adding new content to the game. I’m not sure how long I’m going to keep playing because it’s very time consuming and there’s so much to do. But it is a fricking awesome action and it being free is a fantastically good deal.

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!