This was a free game on Epic and these days I choose to not even accept them if I know I’ll never play a title. This one attracted me due to it being set in 14th century France and ostensibly being about the black plague. I also believed that it would be a narrative-heavy, relatively short game with light gameplay mechanics. As it turned out these impressions were all incorrect. Instead this is a full-on stealth game with significant combat mechanics, is fairly substantial in length and the plague is represented only as the endless horde of rats that is your primary antagonist. I was miffed for a long while for not getting the game I expected but honestly the game is solid enough that it eventually managed to win me around anyway.

I tend to shy away from any first person shooters now especially ones that aren’t open-world games. They’re just not my thing now that I’m older and they all mostly cater to the multiplayer crowd nowadays anyway. But enough people have called the single-player campaign in Titanfall 2 best-in-class, that is the best entry in the shooter genre for years, that I feel that I have to check it out especially since it’s so cheap now. Honestly this is a 2016 game but I’m so far behind the curve and so ignorant of graphics in general I suppose, that this looks like the prettiest game I’ve played in a while.

Farming games were popular for a while and I don’t mean the silly ones like Farmville but the more substantial ones like the Harvest Moon series. But the latter was mostly confined to console platforms for a long time so I never had a chance to try them. Eventually Stardew Valley appeared for the PC which I understand is a pretty typical clone of this style of game and so I bought it. But it still took me this long to get around to actually play it and by now of course no one cares about this genre any longer.

I haven’t played basketball, either in real life or as a video game, since high school and even then it’s not I fully understood the sport anyway. But as most will know, this title was a giveaway on the Epic platform a while back and I was curious about what a modern sports game is like these days. Basketball at least isn’t totally cryptic to me like American football is but do note that I’m only taking a brief look at this game so this isn’t a real review or anything like that as this is all too unfamiliar to me. I don’t even know what most of the terms used in this game means.

This is another game that has been sitting unplayed in my library for way too long even though I was quite enthusiastic about it when it was first released. It’s just a matter of it being known for being a very difficult game that would require considerable investment and too many titles competing for my time. The difficult part is certainly right. A couple of days after starting to play, my band of mercenaries was wiped out to the last man. I had to experiment with a few more restarts at lowered difficulty levels in order to understand how it works before committing to it for real at normal difficulty.

This was a free game on Epic and I never considered buying it myself. But maybe I should have since this is a game by Remedy and I’ve always been a fan of their story-telling. Since I’m also a fan of the SCP website and the game is very obviously inspired by it, that’s even more reason to appreciate the setting. Many will know as being one of the first games to implement DLSS and ray-tracing. Even though my GPU technically supports the technology, the resolution looked so low to me that I just stuck with the older rendering methods.

Picked a nice puzzle game to change up the pace a bit and of course it’s a programming game. As I understand the people who made this achieved some success with games like Human Resource Machine on mobile platforms and this is a sequel with an expanded scope and a similar office-type setting. There’s a backstory about how the world is ruled by robots and the humans are drones who need to be given precise instructions to get them to do anything with cutscenes and everything. It’s a little amusing but it’s not a great story and not really relevant.