I never got around to playing the War of the Chosen expansion pack for XCOM2 which was probably a mistake given how good everyone says it is. This smaller, standalone builds on it with human and alien populations having achieved peace but naturally there are still dissident factions from both sides who are unhappy. This game puts you in control of Chimera Squad, composed of both human and alien soldiers, who are assigned to keep the peace in City 31. This squad isn’t part of XCOM but the Reclamation Agency meant as a police force rather than a military force. Unlike the XCOM games, each member of the squad is a unique individual and losing even one of them means game over.

80 Days was such a unique game that I still think of it from time to time years later. So when the developer Inkle made a game that has you play as an archaeologist and the primary gameplay mechanic involves deciphering a language, I was all over it. In practice, the invented language seems too directly translatable into English to be plausible and the protagonist Aliya is a rather poor archaeologist. There’s nothing else like this game though and it is very satisfying to uncover the history of civilization of the setting so I’d still count this as a success.

Just a quick write-up on the expansion for the game. Like many modern DLCs, this one is set in a separate area of the game and chronologically takes place shortly before the final battle. As far as I’m concerned it’s a near perfect DLC: the frozen lands of the new area is different enough to feel fresh, the enemies are harder but still a logical expansion of the original ones, and I loved how you actually do get to talk to an AI at the end.

What’s it say about how far back my backlog dates that I’ve only gotten around to play this at a time when even its sequel is already old news. It’s not quite as bad as that since the Complete Edition I’m playing was only released in 2020. Still, it’s pretty bad and it means I have to be a lot more discerning about what I add to my to play list. As far as I’m concerned, this game looks pretty amazing still playing it now. In my opinion, it’s a fantastic, very well-rounded game and I would have absolutely loved it if I had come across it 10 years ago. Even now, I think it’s really good, yet I played too many open-world games by now to be impressed by its world and yeah, over the month I’ve actually been more engrossed in playing around with ChatGPT than this.

I’m a bit of a sucker for games that manage to combine mechanics with story in interesting ways, especially with this being about playing a king who has to balance the needs of his country and also his family. Unfortunately I don’t think this counts as one of the successful examples as too often it’s difficult to tell which outcomes are hardcoded to happen no matter what you do and how much your decisions actually matter. It’s also an odd combination of sometimes being cutesy and other times being horrifically dark. I laud its makers for their boldness in creating what is in effect a very grim fairy tale but in the end, this isn’t a game that really worked for me.

I’ve stopped regularly playing boardgames a long time ago, yet I still experienced a touch of big box envy when I read about the Kickstarter for this project and all of the miniatures it contained. So when I saw the digital adaptation available for free on Epic, I naturally snagged it as quickly as possible. It really is a complete and faithful adaptation of the original boardgame and therefore includes an insane amount of content. In real-life playing through a full campaign might take months and even playing alone on this digital version might take over 100 hours. Alas after learning the rules and finishing several scenarios, I’ve discovered that this is too hefty a commitment for me. Even at a lowered difficulty level, this is tuned to be hard enough to require near optimal decision-making. I’m grateful to have been able to finally try this game out for nothing more than the cost of my own time but this is too stressful to me to be much fun.

Since I’ve gotten a driving wheel, I’ve been trying out all kinds of driving games. Yet I’m still at heart a computer nerd who knows nothing about cars at all and drives an automatic in real life. So when this popped up as a free game on Epic, I immediately picked it up, thinking I might learn a thing or two. As you might expect, no, you can’t learn how to be a mechanic from a video game but it does at least give you some idea of the mechanical components that make up a car and how they all fit together, plus the tools and equipment that are found in a garage. Unfortunately it is also a simulator in another, less pleasant way. After a while playing this becomes repetitive and grindy enough that it feels almost like a real job.