As I’ve mentioned before, I simply adore the text-based storytelling games by Inkle and so just had to get this one. Unfortunately, while Heaven’s Vault had the problem of being too long and too ambitious, this one has the opposite problem of being far too short and too simple. You can be done with pretty much all the content in a couple of hours and even a simple first win will take no more than an hour. I do like the premise but there’s just too little content and the production values are somewhat lackluster as well.

While I’m waiting for a new PC before I get around to playing Elden Ring, I’ve decided to give this old game a go, known for being a Souls-like game that much harder than Dark Souls itself. Personally I did find this to be more complex and more difficult, enough so that finishing it was a real chore to me and I’m not sure that I had much fun doing it. I didn’t much care for the story crafted from a fictionalized version of Japan’s real Sengoku period nor for its lack of a cohesive world either. I can understand why this series has its fans but it’s not for me.

I haven’t put that much time into Assetto Corsa and I don’t think I’ll ever be the kind of sim racer willing to do lap after lap on all of the well known tracks. Even so I bought all of the DLCs for the sake of convenience and I’m messing around with all kinds of cars, tracks and mods just for fun without really caring about being competitive. I have to admit some of the mods have been too complex for me. I don’t really understand how AI traffic works and some of the biggest mods come with requirements beefier than what my system can handle. A lot of the mods also seem to be incomplete and their quality varies greatly. I’d had to moderate my expectations but I still had a lot of fun just messing with things and not taking it too seriously.

I haven’t skipped a single one of Zachtronics’ puzzle games so far but now I’m thinking that I should probably have skipped this one. To me this feels like a rehash of SpaceChem but with hexes instead of squares. In reality, it goes back to an even earlier game by Zach Barth before he even founded the company but that was before my time. I loved SpaceChem but it was so difficult that I could never do some of the later puzzles. This title however is in line with their more recent games with drastically reduced difficulty. The main game posed no challenge to me at all and the accompanying story is so shallow I wondered why there needed to be a story at all.

So this is the famous sim racing game that everyone loves despite its age because it has a ton of mods covering every possible car and track. I’m still mainly interested in rally racing games but I thought I owed it to myself to at least gain a little experience on the more serious side of sim racing. Even getting this properly installed with the Content Manager that is practically required these days plus the basic set of mods that everyone recommends was quite an undertaking. As expected, I fairly terrible at this and don’t have the dedication to really get good, but it’s been fun enough for me.

I own a copy of the Twilight Struggle boardgame and though it mostly sits unplayed, I’ve always admired how it portrays real world history in terms of game mechanics. I was naturally intrigued when GMT Games later published a game about the US War on Terror using some of the same mechanics. This was long after I’ve stopped playing boardgames so I had to wait until this digital version to check it out. I had no illusions about the digital version being actually enjoyable as I know this should really be played against real people. I only really wanted to learn and understand the mechanics and in that I was satisfied enough.

I have a soft spot for the Warhammer 40k turn-based games and this one even covers a more rarely seen faction: the Adeptus Mechanicus of the Imperium of Man. It seems obvious in retrospect how interesting it would be to pit them against the Necrons but it has never occurred to me either. What happens when the Mechanicus, who replace pieces of their flesh with cybernetics, encounters the Necrons who completed the same transition eons ago? This is a squad scale game so you actually are controlling individual Techpriests and their Skitarii soldiers as they explore a Necron tomb world. The upside is that it has enough customization options and novel mechanics to make it interesting. The downside is that it soon gets repetitive and is probably too easy.