This is a first-person shooter where time only moves when you do. This means that you can plan out exactly how to take down each enemy and react to bullets flying at you. You die if you get hit a single time, but the levels are short and you can restart instantly. The game itself is short as well; it took me about two or three hours to complete.
This is the 2013 game by Crystal Dynamics rather than the 1996 original by Core Design. I loved the original game on the PS1, and although this one shares the same name, it’s not a remake. This is an origin story of Lara Croft that’s more focused on characters and feels more grounded in reality—although not too much, as it still has mythological creatures coming to life.
I got my copy from Standard Ebooks, which is a site making excellent ebooks of public domain books. I’m finding them to be better than anything I’d find on the Kobo store other than Penguin Classics.
An HTML5 game in which you’re head of research in a company that’s performing experiments on something only known as “Subject 219”. You’re not really given any description of it, or any background of what the company is or the products that get mentioned are.
Just finished Limbo, a very short black-and-white platformer. You play as a little child, and there’s barely any context. From the title, I’m guessing the child has died and is making their way to the afterlife. The game is heavy on trial and error, I was constantly getting killed.
I originally bought this on the PlayStation Vita in 2013, and had given up on actually completing it. I finally beat it on the Steam Deck today. The game is a platformer with sixteen levels over four areas, but apart from the final one each level is randomly generated. It is incredibly difficult, and is happy to kill you within seconds of starting. Each time you die you have to start again with freshly generated levels. You can unlock shortcuts to the later areas as you go by providing items to a man digging tunnels.
This may be the fifth time that I’ve gotten all 120 stars in this game, although it could be more. My brother bought this at release in the US as we happened to be there on holiday at the time. It was just unbelievable at the time, such a leap forward in video games. I really doubt we’ll ever see anything like it again. The last game I played Jumping Flash! only came out the year before and the difference in controls and depth is incredible.
I got the original PlayStation at launch in the UK by going halves with my brother. We got a memory card and Ridge Racer, which I finished the same day. It also came with a demo disk that had an interactive T-Rex, and a demo for Loaded among other games. I think there was a video for WipeOut maybe too.
This was this months pick for the Dystopian Novels Book Club. It is a science fiction novel set in a future where women have been stripped of all rights in the US. Humans have gained contact with multiple alien species, and only a subset of linguist families called The Lines are able to communicate with them. There are a group of women who are creating their own language centred around the female perspective in the hope of freeing themselves.
This is a game where you play as a border guard in 1982 for a fictional Soviet style country. Sat in your station, you call people in one by one and check all of their documents. The rules and requirements of these change quite regularly. You get paid for the amount of people you process, and get fined for mistakes.
This is another game that I played at release but didn’t finish. This time I played the remastered version by Nightdive Studios, which is pretty faithful. It feels like they did a great job cleaning it up but not changing the game in any real way.
I bought this at release, but never finished it. This time I played the remastered version that was released recently. In the original version I think I got kept getting lost, and the new version adds a feature that draws markers in the world to show you were you need to go next. I think that’s a great feature that should get added into lots of old shooters.
I played along with the Retrograde Amnesia podcast, this is the game for series 5. This game was never released in the UK, though I was aware of it at the time. I’d played Xenogears through an emulator and absolutely loved it. I didn’t have a way to play import PS2 games though. Strangely they released Episode 2 here, but it can’t have sold well since they then didn’t release 3.
This was this months pick for the Dystopian Novels Book Club. I really thought I had already read this, but if that’s the case it was long enough ago that I didn’t really remember the details.
I think this might be my favourite Dragon Quest game now, I loved it the whole way through. Usually Dragon Quest games have a fairly thin overarching story, but a great collection of little stories in each town you visit. I think this one still has the second, but they all tie in to a much stronger narrative. The game also has such a wonderful cast of characters, but Sylvando is a standout. He is just a constant source of joy throughout.