This bird-themed game won a lot of praise and awards a few years back and I’d always been curious about it though I’d stopped playing physical boardgames by then. So when they made this digital version, I thought I’d at least learn the rules and check it out for myself. I’ve read that some players have had synchronizing issues with multiplayer but that doesn’t concern me and I have to say that this is an exceptionally pretty and slick digital conversion.

I haven’t been posting anything about games recently because I’ve been stuck for way too much time in the world of Red Dead Redemption 2. The first game was originally released in 2010 and I really wanted to play it but it was a PlayStation exclusive. It did eventually get a PC adaptation, in 2024, but the second game in the series arrived on PC first in 2019. Pure insanity. It still took a while for me to get around to playing this because it has rather hefty system requirements and I wanted to experience it at full quality. By now the game is old enough that it’s far from state of the art. Yet it’s still so gorgeous and detailed that it doesn’t matter at all and I’m glad I waited to play it.

I came upon this game because this has a fair number of recommendations and indeed a mostly text-based adventure game is something I’d normally love. The setting aboard a decrepit space station and the player being a sort of slave within a robot body make for an intriguing and the writing is mostly solid. However I soured on it pretty fast once I realized that the desperation of the setting is mostly narrative fluff as it’s actually a rather safe game. Furthermore all of the stories in it stand alone so it’s not so much a world but simply a loose collection of independent stories.

This was another free game from Epic which I wouldn’t have bought on my own but was glad to try since it’s been a long time since I’d played a Civilization type game. Yet this isn’t Civilization, which makes it both interesting and tricky. There were many times I’d assumed the mechanics worked similarly and was proven wrong. I believe that this was designed so as to be completed at a more reasonable pace and in this it succeeds. Unfortunately its rules make it too game-like, almost like a boardgame writ large and so neither simulates well the history of nations nor feels very thematic.

I’d been looking forward to this odd little game, a World War II-era tank combat simulator that uses ASCII graphics. It looks ancient but it’s actually a relatively recent release. Similarly, learning the interface and the ruleset also seems daunting but there’s not actually that much to it. It was a blast to figure how it all works and to experience commanding different types of units. Unfortunately while there are many campaigns to play, they all feel repetitive and similar after a while as the core gameplay loop is really quite simple.

In every post about fighting games, I always note how awful I am at them. Well, I still am but I picked this one up specifically because it’s said to be beginner-friendly. Indeed, not only does it have simple buttons so that you don’t have to learn complex technical inputs but it also includes one of the most comprehensive in-game tutorials I’ve seen. Not being familiar to the franchise, the characters are all new to me and feel like generic rip-offs of better established characters. But the gameplay seems solid and the art looks nice enough. I’d planned to learn this better but unfortunately I’d hurt my hand recently and that cut my time with it shorter than I might have liked.

Ages and ages ago, I’d imagined how cool it would be if there existed some kind of strategy game about managing a xianxia sect. ‘Lo and behold, one now exists, made naturally by a Chinese company. It has mediocre graphics, very poorly explained mechanics and a bad user interface, but it does more or less let you run your own sect from the beginning up until you manage to nurture your cultivators into god-like beings. So it’s great, right? Well, maybe not. In between the bugs, intricate mechanics, challenge level and tendency to drop gotchas on the player, this can be a very time-consuming and frustrating experience. I already know I won’t be able to persevere all the way to the end but I’m still trying to see as much of the game as I can.