Excellent, very helpful, thanks.

I’ve heard about #12in12 which is funny because I am aiming for #60in12 this year in order to clear out my backlog (admittedly, most of those games will be short little indie games). So far I’m on track, 3 games finished since January 1!

Hmm, Catherine. I wanted to borrow that for PS3 from my game library at work (this was at Ubisoft, obviously) when it first came out, but as embarrassing at it sounds, I didn’t want to deal with my wife’s reaction to the “sexy” cover art and tone. Now that I have my own home office with a door that I can close to hide…

Well, you still could go through and experience it anyway... (but yeah it sounds seriously depressing)

This is me. I found the gameplay pretty unforgiving, at least for my butterfingered controller skills, once you get more than a couple of hours past Hornet (the last specific boss I can remember at the moment). I eventually bailed out of frustration with repeatedly walking for 5 minutes to get killed in 15 seconds.

Definitely not an RPG! I always call this genre “adventure games” because that’s what they called them back in the 90s, but I think that term is pretty out of date (and it’s always been vague). The gameplay is more like Monkey Island, Blackwell Legacy etc.— collect object, combine object with object, collect clues and…

First up, note that we are now voting on our candidates for the 63rd Game Revue Club over on Steam:

Cool, thanks for jumping in. I saw Burly Men at Sea in the Switch store a while back and was wondering if it would be any good. Sounds a little bit light for my tastes (at the moment) but still kind of fun. As for This War of Mine... it’s on my backlog and I did do one or two sessions a few years ago, but ugh, that…

That’s right, I did hear that term from you! So good. And you’ve also found the perfect redefinition of “walking simulator”. 2-for-2.

Wandersong is on my wishlist for sure, and I would have probably bought it right away after reading some really glowing reviews... if I hadn’t decided to actually save some money for a while by playing the games I already own. Boring...

Exactly, “walking simulators” is a really dismissive term. I am trying to transition towards a replacement term that I heard somewhere, “environmental narratives”, although that’s even more of an annoying mouthful...

I mean, I kind of liked how, for once in a video game, it turns out that there is not actually a giant conspiracy, just one guy causing trouble. Sort of refreshing even if not the most exciting story imaginable.

I heard Just Cause 4 was pretty bad (and I read a review at Rock Paper Shotgun of the PC version which sounded like it was just one huge pile of bugs). All I know of it is that my son likes watching Let’s Play videos of it where the player just sends as many people as possible into space with the balloon and/or sticky…

Nice, good to know. That coin flip is now weighted slightly more towards Sexy Brutale.

Good thought, thanks. I have this new PS4 that I have to do more things with (once Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst and of course Mass Effect: Andromeda are out of the way), so that demo (at least) might be on the list before long.

Thanks for the extensive thoughts on Unavowed. I liked a lot of the same things you’ve mentioned here, but there were some hiccups in the execution of those great ideas that apparently prevented me from engaging as much with them as I could have, so I came away feeling pretty flat about the game. Yes, you have the…

I think you’re right, and I haven’t played the game as a cohesive experience (mostly just reading the script and watching cutscenes with a few brief moments of in-game testing), so I can’t really judge it... but in general, spending time with awful people is not really my jam when it comes to gaming, even if there is a…

Whoa, way to bury the lede with your top 10 of 2018 at the very end of the post! I haven’t played most of those, but I’m kind of surprised to see Unavowed at the very top. To me, it seemed kind of incomplete— like, good ideas that didn’t really gel into a good game (although I liked the dialogue a lot, especially…

First thing to mention is that we are now doing nominations for our 63rd edition of the Game Revue Club over in the Gameological group on Steam. Here’s the link (or find this same page within Steam)— looking forward to your nominations through 9pm next Thursday (January 10).

Oh god, I worked on Far Cry 3 for a little while (taking over for a friend on vacation) during my stint in localization at Ubi Montreal and you are absolutely right. After the genuinely gripping moment when you meet Vaas at the beginning, it’s all just awful Bros in the Wilderness throughout. Look forward to a few…