Continuing on with my run of short games, this is a totally free game that can be easily downloaded on itch.io but will also be coming to Steam soon. As you should be able to see from these screenshots, this is an old-style point-and-click adventure game with pixel graphics. The title itself refers of course to the famous novel by Italo Calvino, which I actually have read a while back due to my wife’s insistence, but barring some minor references the game doesn’t actually have anything to do with the book.

I haven’t played a first person shooter in a very long time and this one is an old game, first released some ten years ago, though this Redux version I believe updates the engine some. I only played it for two reasons: because it was free, one of the many offered by Epic to lure players to try out their platform, and because I actually have read the novel it is based on. I didn’t really like the book either but I do know this game was a hit, spawning multiple sequels so I wanted to be able to compare.

This was briefly popular several years ago but as usual it takes me a while to get through my wish list of games. It’s a very simple game but I really felt like playing something light and quick as a palate cleaner after the monstrosity that was Pathfinder: Kingmaker. You can learn this in minutes and be done with the standard campaign in a few hours.

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.