Return of the Obra Dinn
A genuine one-off. This game made me feel like I was extremely dense as I bumbled around the ship trying, and often failing, to piece together tiny little clues, but I did chip away at it over a couple of weeks and actually got there in the end. (I confess to brute forcing the last half-dozen or so entries, but in my defence they were all generic sailors who did virtually nothing and then fell overboard - I'd uncovered the actual story well before this point). I very much admire the game's dedication to never breaking the fourth wall - there are no tutorials, no pop-ups, no hints, just you and a logbook and nothing else. And the audio design is extraordinary throughout, bringing things to life in a way that most games simply are unable to do.
I did find the need to constantly criss-cross the decks to revisit previous memories a little tedious (there's no real reason why you couldn't have done all that from the book, once you'd seen things for the first time) and the story wasn't quite as interesting as perhaps I'd hoped (barring one great twist at the end), but it's a clever, intricate, impossibly atmospheric little thing overall and if you value brainpower over reaction times then it's one you need to experience.
I killed off Kaiden at the first opportunity. Ashley might be a horrible space racist (and, hilariously, in ME3, a horrible space racist with a MAGA makeover) but at least she's interesting.
I haven’t played Andromeda but it seems to be the rule that every Mass Effect game has to have Generic Man as a key companion. ME3’s version was particularly forgettable.
Doom: The Dark Ages - it does go on a bit - it could probably have lost a handful of levels from the middle game and been a tighter experience, and the last couple of levels are just fighting the same pointy-headed bastard over and over again until he finally goes down - but it was still a lot of fun in a brains-off kind of way and I enjoyed my time with it a great deal. My favourite of the three modern Doom games by quite a way.
Play
Doom: The Dark Ages - I'm close to the end of this now. It's certainly got its issues (it's a bit long and samey, the plot is absolute bobbins, most encounters feel like loads of enemies chucked into an arena rather than anything that's had any real thought put into it) but on a moment-by-moment basis it feels absolutely fucking brilliant to play and I've enjoyed it immensely. It's a game that knows that at heart it's creating a power fantasy and it's there in every detail: the thud of your footsteps as you rush into battle, the shockwave as you land from a height that means even the act of you entering battle helps to start to turn the tide, the absurdly generous parry timing that in many lesser games would be used as a skill check but in this just goes towards making you feel awesome. It's big, loud, violent and stupid and I love it.
The Return of the Obra Dinn - absorbing and atmospheric mystery game that requires genuine thought and doesn't reveal its secrets easily. I've been chipping away at this for a week or two and I'm getting there, slowly. Sometimes it feels like the need to plod slowly round the decks gets in the way of the deduction a little (if you want to rewatch a particular scene, you have to navigate back to the corpse in question rather than just being able to review it from your notebook) and in that sense I felt Curse of the Golden Idol was maybe a more cerebral kind of mystery game, but the atmosphere is second to none and I feel like I've learned a lot about life onboard a ship as part of the process of piecing things together.
Want
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment - please be good please be good. I loved Tears of the Kingdom, I love Hyrule Warriors, what can possibly go wrong?
Anno 117 - still haven't seen a single impression of the console releases, I'm getting a bit concerned now. I mean obviously it's a PC-focused series and I could, if absolutely required, run it via my Steam Deck hooked up to my monitor (it works tolerably well for Anno 1800) but really I'd like to kick back with a proper console version if they can actually make it work well.
Bin
Nothing specific this month.
Garwoofoo