This game sucked up way too much of my life recently, taking far more time to complete than I expected and completely messing up my schedule. This is of course the famous videogame adaptation of the Pathfinder rules, itself descended from the old Dungeons & Dragons rules. Like everyone else in my generation, one of my fondest gaming memories were about playing the Baldur’s Gate series so of course I wanted more of that gaming magic made to modern standards. Even better, it now officially supports turn-based combat so I can take my time micro-managing every action for maximum optimization.

Here’s yet another small game by some of the same people behind Failbetter Games and naturally since it’s a narrative-based game with cards, how could I resist? Unfortunately this is one game I did not like at all, mainly due to how tediously grindy it is. You’re supposed to have fun by exploring the gameplay mechanics by yourself and learning what cards interactions are possible but I find that as achieving victory takes quite some time and a little bit of luck even when you fully understand how everything works. As such, you’re just prolonging the pain unnecessarily by repeating the same actions over and over again if you refrain from looking things up.

A long time ago when I had a PSP, my two favorite games on it were Burnout Legends and some version of Monster Hunter. Unfortunately I was never able to get very far with the latter no matter how much I loved the concept as I found the controls very difficult on a handheld platform, particularly as there was no lock-on feature and you needed to manually control the camera while controlling your character at the same time. Anyway that’s why through the years I kept an eye on the series and of course I eventually bought it when an English version finally made its way to the PC.

Commandos was one of the series of games that intrigued me but I never got around to playing any of them and now they seem too old to go back to. So along comes developer Mimimi Games who seems intent on single-handedly reviving this never very popular genre. This is described as a stealth-oriented real-time tactics game. It’s stealth as your characters can’t stand up to protracted combat and must rely on quietly taking out guards without alerting others. It’s real-time so there’s no way to pause to consider the situation and issue orders without time pressure. And I suppose it’s tactics because you’ll often need to have your characters work in concert to get past different obstacles and situations.

I bought this a while ago, motivated mainly because I now own a Hori Mini Fighting Stick and wanted to try different fighting games with it. Also because I have never played a single Soulcalibur game before and this newest entry in the franchise features Geralt of Rivia as a guest character. Beyond the fact that it’s one of the few fighting games involving characters who are armed with melee weapons plus the character Ivy in it often appears as a sex object, I knew nothing about this franchise beforehand.

So it was three years ago that I played Sunless Sea. I loved it so much that I had been looking forward to sitting down to play this sequel even though I knew that it is a very similar game. It is in fact nearly identical to the previous game in terms of gameplay but it does have a new setting, new stories and quests, better combat, and most of all, everything has been cleaned up and greatly improved with a better interface and much better graphics.

Tabletop wargaming is of course the ultimate in grognard hobbies, especially historical ones. I will never of course actually play a tabletop wargame, never mind go to the immense expense and effort to buy and paint miniatures. But from time to time, I do wonder what the rules for one might be like and how it might feel to play it. Enter Field of Glory 2 which aims to recreate this sort of experience on the PC, minus the miniature collecting and painting part of course. I don’t know if this is actually a popular ruleset for wargamers but I do know that they publish a hardback rulebook for this so it is a real tabletop wargame.