I loved first game and naturally had this sequel on my watch list from day one. It was a fantastic puzzle solving experience combined with a very satisfying frame story. I thought that it had the difficulty at just about the right level for me. I never did get around to the DLC Road to Gehenna which is said to be far more difficult than the base game. This sequel naturally builds on the first game and the prologue even tricks you into believing that it is literally more of the same. Soon enough the real world opens to you and it proves that it is a worthy sequel indeed.

Satisfactory took way too much of my time so for a follow-up, I wanted something short and chill. This potion brewing game almost fit that bill except that it’s a tad too long as there is some grinding towards the end. It’s another crafting game but the crafting part is more than just selecting an option from a list. Here you brew potions by actually grinding ingredients and dropping them into the cauldron. The concept is clever and it uses familiar mechanics in a novel way to simulate the process of brewing a potion. It’s not a deep game but it’s not bad at all.

I’d skipped any posts about games for the past few months because I’ve been totally engrossed in this one and it took way longer than I’d expected to complete. I’ve since clocked up almost as many hours at this as Dirt Rally 2.0 and that’s a game I’ve been playing on and off for years! I’m kind of ashamed that it took me so long really as I kept doing things by hand for way too long and procrastinated over building large-scale infrastructure which would have saved me time over the long run. Still, this is very much the kind of game that everyone plays in their own way and by and large, I’m fairly happy with what I managed to build.

This was popular for a while when it was in Early Access but I usually wait until a game is finished before even considering buying it. Unfortunately this seems to be one of those cases when the finished game is worse than the work in progress version as the campaign is a real slog to get through and they even took out some ease-of-life features. The scenarios are quite difficult and they made an iron man style mandatory. It’s quite impressive how they’re not afraid of throwing absolutely massive hordes at zombies at you, but in the end it’s not worth the aggravation and I didn’t finish the game.

This is probably the most popular mod for Assetto Corsa and I’ve wanted to play around with it for some time now. The system requirements are quite significant however so I put it off until I’d upgraded my PC. Now that I’ve done so, I thought I’d also put in the work to make this 10-year old game look as good as it possibly can. This means finally getting around to buying Pure, installing a new pp filter and even getting the right custom shaders patch settings. I can’t honestly say that it looks like a brand new game but it does make for a drastic graphical improvement.

The investigative genre is notoriously hard to implement as a video game. Any detective story must necessarily be written by the designers in advance, so how to meaningfully use deduction as a gameplay mechanic? One way is to constrain the scope of the investigation in a specific way so that the game can easily verify if the player is correct. This is how the excellent Return of the Obra Dinn does it. I thought I’d see how this game about a murder investigation set in a very strange world did it. Unfortunately while the story is well-written, with multiple suspects and lines of investigation, the mechanics are nothing special. It’s all about thoroughly exploring every nook and cranny of the island to collect all the clues. I enjoyed the world and the storyline but it doesn’t feel like a true investigative game to me.

I held off on playing this for some time because it was an Epic Games exclusive for a while and after that it was confusing how they folded everything under the World of Assassination umbrella. Even figuring out what to actually buy on Steam if I only wanted to play the Hitman 3 campaign was something of a chore. I love the series so much I was also going to play it of course but it was probably a good idea to give it a bit of time because I can still get burned out by playing too much of something I enjoy. This final installment of the trilogy got off to a rocky start for me as the Dubai map was underwhelming but the rest are so very good with some interesting variations of the existing formula. I am however upset by the unreliable availability of the servers as it has an online requirement even though I’m only interested in the single-player experience.