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.

My Steam Replay tells me that by far my most played game of 2022 has continued to be Dirt Rally 2.0 as I’ve made a more determined effort to go through just about every bit of content in it. But of course all sim rally racers will tell you that the greatest ever sim rally game ever made continues to be Richard Burns Rally, a game that was first released in 2004. Its makers having long gone out of business, the game is today maintained by a community of fans and modders, and is effectively free to download. I elected to download the version from rallysimfans.hu, the so-called Hungarian plugin as everyone says it is the most developed and has the largest community.

As I promised a while back, I enjoyed Shadow Tactics so much that I decided then and there that I would play the Western-themed but similar genre game by the same developer. It took a while but here we are. This title pretty much offers the exact same type of gameplay and I unfortunately discovered that I don’t really like the Western-theme much after this being the second such game I’ve played this month. The guns do indeed make this more action-oriented if you want but it still feels more satisfying to be stealthy so this felt like more of the same for me. Eventually I warmed up to it enough to be just as engrossed by the more complex levels but I still prefer the earlier game more and I had no desire to replay levels for the sake of grinding stars and achievements.

This was a free game that I decided to try for a bit because it’s been a while since I last played a shooter and I actually liked an earlier game in the series. I did finish it as the game seems rather easy to me even at hard difficulty and it’s quite short but I didn’t really like it at all. I thought it felt extremely linear and the story is just a tour of the most famous names of the Wild West with a classic revenge plot as the connective tissue.

So finally I get around to play something that is relatively recent. This was a virtually unknown game when it was released by a brand new studio. It quickly gained attention due to its beautiful cyberpunk visuals and due to the bugginess of Cyberpunk 2077 on release, was even hailed as the superior game. To me, the isometric view and gun-based reminded me of Crusader: No Remorse, an old game I have fond memories of, so I bought it not long afterwards. Unfortunately while its visuals are indeed fantastic, I’d judge its gameplay to be only average while its story and characters are downright forgettable.