Man of Honor DLC for Mafia The Old Country was fun. It kind of connects that game to the original Mafia by showing some of the backstory of the main villain in Mafia. Only a couple of hours, but fun to play in that world again.

Twisted Tower is fun BioShock like indie and runs well!

Order of the Sinking Star has release date 8th October!

I finally tried AC 4 remake and it's crazy demanding so I gave up but wow, it looks great and combat has small changes, movement is way more fluid. I've a problem with real time games where it feels like at times you are not moving properly, I've yet to play LOTR Shadow of War because of it.

I just read that 1666 Amsterdam used so much AI content that the devs forgot to separate human content but there's a prologue demo at least

Indie game Twisted Tower has release date in 2 days. I tried the demo, it's nice!

Played through Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Heart of the Forest. Really engaging adventure game, the story and writing were very well done, and the subject matter being something very local and contained to a particular location felt like a good choice. More games should do that. Played it in one sitting as it kept me hooked and interested throughout.

Hogwarts Legacy 2 confirmed development. Apparently no official details but rumors are larger world, a morality system, multiplayer and Quidditch. Possible release date 2027 Q1 to summer. I can't wait to play multi and even better, no HUD VR multi and connection to HBO series that arrive 25th December

Keev, did you ever give the PC version of Kingdom Hearts a try? I'm curious about the game, but some reviews mention terrible performance issues and call it a sloppy PC port, so I was wondering if you (as owner of this version) had any experience with it.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1574480/Agent_64_Spies_Never_Die

I've tried the demo, it's very good!

Played through Directive 8020 with my lady. It was fun, but I feel that it was the weakest of the Dark Pictures Anthology games. The overall connection to the universe was very thin, just a few messages here and there. And some of the sneaking around mechanics could have been done a little bit better. The choices were also a little bit more obscure and unpredictable than previous games. The twists and underlying secrets of the narrative that was happening were quite interesting though so it kept us hooked.

Finished everything in the first area in Avowed. Truly a beautiful and very cosy feeling RPG even if it deals with dark themes. The Pillars of Eternity lore and world building fit so well here. Took me a solid 20 hours for that, bit of a break with a Werewolf The Apocalyse game before continuing with the second area.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4935510/Cellar_Keeper

Very important game! xD

Clockwork theme in Trine 5 is great. I've high hopes for inXile upcoming Clockwork Revolution, it could be a new Bioshock series

Hopefully just a matter of time until they bring the update to other stores too.

Quake got a new campaign, "Dawn of the Machine". For now, you can only play it if you have the Steam version though, because Bethesda prioritized it over GOG and Epic store versions, which sucks. :/

I read after about a year updates had done its work. I tried it then, it's better than I thought and lore wise quite fun if one has played PoE games

Absolutely loving my time with Avowed.

Finished Trine 3. Much better than I remembered. Onto 4th and then 5th. Going to wait with 6th for coop with someone lol

Played through Vampire The Masquerade: Heartless Lullaby. Kind of a lovely free mini taste of cRPG in World of Darkness. Quite neat for what it is. Who knows if we will ever get the proper full game that this demo was supposed to pitch for, but it would really be nice to get an RPG with depth one day in some World of Darkness setting.

35 games for the year, somehow I keep burning through stuff. Next up, Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Heart of the Forest.

I wouldn't be surprised if they remake the rest of the Halo games by outsourcing that work heavily as well. But it all depends on whether this one does well financially.

Basically, they want to abandon their internal tech and move all future Halo games to Unreal. This was originally started as such an experiment, the vast majority of work was outsourced while the bigger part of the internal team is working on the next main Halo game. Recreating it gives them something very sensible to work against, with clear goal and target, as they have to recreate all systems and features of their tech inside the scope of Unreal. Easier to manage than a fresh new game.

But why, if it's still the same game, essentially? The remaster seemed totally fine to me, graphically. It was the gameplay (particularly level design, as you said) that was lame.

That was just a remaster I guess in whatever tech they had back in the day. This one recreates everything in Unreal Engine 5.

Why would you need a faithful remake that keeps everything as in the original, when there was already the Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary remaster? (Which I never finished because it was so boring ...)

What a wasted opportunity to reimagine what Halo could be for modern days, more matured audience, and future generations. Still the same munchkin kids being your primary enemy, still the same teenage-rated narrative, still not being able to take anything story wise seriously when sugar-drugged kids are the threat of the galaxy. Oh well. I guess I wanted more than to play the same game that was developed for consoles in the late 90s and early 00s.

The new prequel levels were the best part of this release. Too bad the cool new character was wasted.

Finished the Halo: Campaign Evolved remake of the first game. For better or for worse, it is a faithful remake in Unreal, with all the good and bad that comes with that. Playing it felt like going through some of the worst level design I have ever seen in an FPS game, and it is such a shame that they decided to recreate the horrendous levels of the original game, rather than reimagining them with the 25+ years of level design know-how that subject matter experts have learned since.

I had to play the second-to-last mission on my handheld as there is a 100% crash on PC when using an Nvidia GPU, meaning you will have a hard time completing the game if running the officially-recommended drivers, and I am not going to downgrade drivers for one video game.

Bionic Bay has great atmosphere but I haven't unlocked the teleport ability yet and it seems difficulty might be too much later.

Super Hand Adventure sure has good polish and animations even if typical platformer, will get the game later.

Cult of the Lamb is getting a board game! I need to get the DLC, itching to play again.

Dive or Die seems real nice. I haven't played much lately so that was a nice surprise. Played any yet Keev?

I wish!

keev, are you going to buy and review ALL the obscure indie games on Steam? ;)

Finished Echoes of the End and really enjoyed it, especially the simple but varied puzzles. Combat was good too and I didn't even mind most boss battles, despite usually hating those. The only ones that made me temporarily decrease difficulty were the two skuggi ones that hardly gave you a window for safe melee attacks. All the others were easy enough to handle.

Played through Netflix' Unhinged. Interesting concept, using your phone as a flashlight and getting calls / messages from the game on it, and stuff happening in-game based on how you react to that. It was too short, but as a demo / concept, definitely interesting. Hopefully they can expand this into a proper game.

So my primary phone died mysteriously as I merely started a mobile browser. Will need to get a hardware diagnosis but no doubt too expensive to repair compared to another refurb phone. I've a backup phone fortunately but what a PITA it is with 2FA for multiple accounts. I've recovery codes but still..

I cannot speak on how the base game might have been at launch, because posts I have seen online mention things that existed / didn't exist when I was playing now with the final patch for the game. So they likely have changed things quite a bit.

People were saying that gameplay is different in the DLCs and what not, but to me it felt all the same, probably they brought bunch of improvements they did for the DLCs back into the main game, thus I did not notice a difference.

Rings of Power season 3 teaser is good too but I'm waiting until the series is finished.

It ran fine on my 9800x3D and RTX 5080. But then again, everything runs fine on that.

AppleTV+ will release Neuromancer TV series 2027 January 22th. Teaser is decent.

xD

Decent technical state?

Played through Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines 2 and the DLCs. The narrative and world building were quite good and engaging, but the city felt like just an empty set dressing, not really an open world or full of any sort of activities, and the combat was rough. Should not have been called Bloodlines as it is not really an RPG, that gave the wrong expectations. It is a good game in the end.

So far, I'm quite enjoying Echoes of the End EE. Thanks for the recommendation, Ele!

Ha! Humble store has it on discount.

Oh right and good you mention it, I forgot to get first Mafia. I played it when it was new but it ran horribly haha

It's open world like how Mafia 1 is open world. The city is there to be mostly for world building, but there no actual activities in it. You mostly travel from place to place and feed, that's about it.

Gamesplanet US has 38% off for Pathologic 3.

Are you using any mods?

Same impression with 1.0 but I thought with patches and QOL mods it might work out as a stand alone semi open world action adventure