#4 April 2024

• Borderlands 3
  

  48.1 hours playtime

  45 of 81 achievements

• Orbital Bullet
  

  12.1 hours playtime

  33 of 55 achievements

• Scorn
  

  6.2 hours playtime

  12 of 12 achievements

• Lightmatter
  

  6.6 hours playtime

  23 of 23 achievements

• Project Wingman
  

  14.0 hours playtime

  32 of 40 achievements

• Paradise Lost
  

  4.5 hours playtime

  12 of 12 achievements

• Grime
  

  10.6 hours playtime

  14 of 47 achievements

Borderlands 3
I felt like it lost some of its charisma compared to the previous titles. The story was plain bad, dialogues were boring, and some of the choices with the character arcs were highly questionable (referring to Maya in particular, without further spoilers). The few cutscenes present were rushed and awkwardly put together at times, especially the ones after the major bosses. The relationship between the antagonists ended up amounting for nothing and the final boss fight was really underwhelming. Just a huge let down as a whole.
Gameplay-wise the gun-play was ultimately passable, and there was a good variety of enemies/quests/activities to do. I didn’t feel the necessity to explore different builds/characters, though. The 1st one I picked worked just fine and I breezed through the game without any particular challenge (I remember the circles of slaughter being much much harder in BL2).
I actually 100%ed the base game, but I decided not to buy the DLCs. They’re too many and I presume─maybe I’m wrong─that they’d mostly be like the ones from BL2, i.e a waste of time, meaning they wouldn’t add anything to the story, they’d be repetitive and feel like a drag to the end. I regretted playing those at the time.
Let’s just say the game is okay if you’re looking for some brainless shooting (but there are better options out there). For everything else, it’s not worth it.

Orbital Bullet
I think it does most of the things properlyfor a rouge-lite. There’s a reasonable sense of progression after each death; there’s a good variety of enemies, classes, weapons and game modes; the 3D pixel graphic is really well made; there’s a sort of autosave feature that lets you quit during runs without losing much (that’s something not usually granted in this kind of games); and lastly, the 360°/”orbital” idea level design is really original, and unexpectedly worked for me (I was skeptical at first). Overall I can say that it’s addicting.
The letdowns are that I found the early bosses harder than the last ones and that some weapons are clearly OP compared to others, making certain builds strongly preferable. Probably the two things are related, meaning that once you have a good build, even supposedly hard bosses become trivial to beat.
Btw, I didn’t encounter any bugs (many people on steam complained about game-breaking bugs. I guess they fixed them?).

Scorn
You find yourself immersed in this morbid world right off the bat: not a text, not a dialogue, not a shed of any kind of explanation or tutorial, but in the end it works (btw it’s so paradoxical that it took me so long to just think to press “R” in order to reload my weapon just because there was no on-screen prompt telling me to do so; same goes for healing). Despite the sole presence of sound─there isn’t even a hint of music─the impacting visuals alone are able to make you feel like you’re really there: an insignificant creature like many others in a vast, unknown and cruel world, lucky enough to be sentient enough to be struggling towards a goal. What is that goal though? Escape? Ascend? Simply survive? It’s not clear and maybe not that important: you just need to keep moving forward. The ending is really sour. It took me a while to get over it.
The puzzles posed the right amount of challenge for my ability.
Overall I liked it.

Lightmatter
The game is not shy at hinting that it took inspiration from Portal. The vibe is similar at times. The puzzles are well thought and never repetitive. It’s clear that they put a lot of effort into their whole design. Even the difficulty scales well the more you progress, without ever being excessive or impossible to overcome with a bit of trial and error. The graphics are simple but pleasant. I liked the voice-acting. Less what the main plot ended out to be. Still, I recommend it.

Project Wingman
Man, it’s weird how much I feel like I suck at this game but still manage to have the time of my life with it. I beat the game on hard mode, but till the very end I kept on crashing into the ground or against airships all by myself like when I had just started playing. I never ever ever ever got the hang of the controls properly. I had to drop mouse and keyboard right away and use a controller. It seems like my brain is not able to process the plane and camera movements separately at the same time, so I had to forget completely about the camera ones and just always look in front of me, where the plane was pointing. Still, I managed to play and enjoy the game to the very end.
The gameplay is really engaging, the physics of the planes are well done, the shooting feels right. Furthermore, the graphics are really pleasing to the eye. I loved the dogfights. I liked much less engaging ground targets instead. Also, the story per se has no big pretenses but it is not half-hassed at all. I liked the soundtrack a lot too.It was a good match during the fights.
The only let down was a bug that made an enemy spawn under the map, which forced me to restart a mission (almost 30 mins in) because I couldn’t kill it in any way and couldn’t progress.
I saw that the game was recently updated (2.0 available in beta play) but I’m hoping they’ll work on a sequel too.
I’ll probably get back to it in the near future and try the hardest difficulty and conquest mode (that I didn’t touch).

Paradise Lost
The story was a bit rushed, most of all considering the relationship between the two protagonists, plus I found it a bit far-fetched (the whole Lucjan part, that is). On the other hand we have the gameplay that is really slow instead. Let’s say it’s not a good combination whatsoever. To make things worse, the story was predictable too. My first thought ended up spoiling the ending. So, I really couldn’t get involved with any part of the game.
Sole saving points: the setting is really well made and full of details, the voice acting was decent and… it’s short? Not enough to recommend the game.
Oh, a secondary thing that fortunately didn’t concern me, but that I found really nonsensical if not plain stupid: when you finish the game, your save file gets deleted for good. So you are supposed to replay the whole game another time (2 times actually) in order to get all the achievements related to the possible endings. The game has no replay value imo, despite the different choices you can make here and there. To me, this thing makes absolutely no sense: it’s like punishing the player for no reason at all. (I was lucky enough that I checked a 100% achievement guide before playing it, so I backed up my save file at the right moment).

Grime
So far, It’s my kind of game. Hard boss fights, learning their attack pattern, beating them while underleveled. I’ll keep playing it next month, but I can already tell I’ll like it.

#3 March 2024

• Cyberpunk 2077
  

  106.0 hours playtime

  57 of 57 achievements

• Visage
  

  13.4 hours playtime

  27 of 27 achievements

• Borderlands 3
  

  2.0 hours playtime

  3 of 81 achievements

Cyberpunk 2077
Finally completed. After exploring through all the possible endings, I must say that the one introduced with the DLC, even if inevitably bittersweet, is the best one in my opinion. Seems like the whole “Blaze of glory or quiet life” conundrum has an obvious answer for me (getting older is giving me perspective it seems, lol).
Oh, something I forgot: the driving… my god… really really awful, probably the worst I have experienced in any game in my life. It baffles me how the state it still is in 2024, after years from release, with CD project saying they’re basically done with the game, is what they intended.

Visage
The game has some really good scares, some morbid and unsettling scenes that are visually impacting, and at times manages to deliver the frantic feeling that’s proper for a survival horror game. On the other hand, the story─as well as some of the puzzles─makes little to no sense. In this regard, there are often no hints as how to proceed and all you can do is aimlessly wander through the house hoping to stumble upon some objects that sometimes weren’t even there before and that have no particular reason to be deemed interactable. I quite hated Dolores’ chapter for that reason because in order to proceed with the game I ended up being forced to search for a guide online, since I was stuck (the alternative was to quit the game altogether). Another bad point is that ghosts spawn randomly; it may be that after they catch you and kill you, once you reload they won’t spawn anymore for a while. That ruined the whole survival aspect of the game for me, not only because I felt there were no real challenge, but also because I basically wasn’t scared of getting caught anymore. Another thing I didn’t like was the inventory management and how you use objects; it really could use some quality of life improvement. Lastly, there are still bugs; I managed to fall off the map without even trying during a videotape sequence. In conclusion, let’s say I really liked the first 1-2 hours of the game (on a 9hour playthrough total), but once I could see past the first impression, all the fun was spoiled for me. Overall I can’t recommend it.

Borderlands 3
I barely started playing. All I can say is that there’s a clear graphic improvement compared to the previous ones, while the gun-play seems a little less convincing. Oh, and the NPCs talk a lot, maybe too much.

#2 FEBRUARY 2024

• Batora: Lost Haven
  

  8.5 hours playtime

  23 of 30 achievements

• Cyberpunk 2077
  

  92.0 hours playtime

  49 of 57 achievements

Batora
Gameplay-wise it ended up being quite repetitive and not challenging enough. The story was weak and I never felt any sort of connection with the main characters. I didn’t particularly like it.

Cyberpunk 2077
It took most of my play time for this month, even because I’ve decided to get all the achievements (still not done). It slowly grew on me, I wasn’t impressed at the beginning, but after a few hours the world started to felt real and it became a real pleasure diving in it. Still, the gameplay and gunplay are’t particularly fun. The strong points of the title are the characters, their story and the world built around them. Often the side jobs turned out to be more interesting than the main ones for that reason. I really enjoyed the DLC, despite the weak premise. I will keep playing it in March and I’m pretty sure I’ll remember this game for a good while once completed.

#1 JANUARY 2024

• Alan Wake
  

  13.6 hours playtime

  44 of 67 achievements

• Baldur's Gate 3
  

  161.7 hours playtime

  38 of 54 achievements

• Cyberpunk 2077
  

  18.0 hours playtime

  4 of 57 achievements

Alan Wake
I really liked how the story was narrated, while I found the gameplay a bit underwhelming. Overall I enjoyed it though.

Baldur’s Gate 3
I spent over 150h on it like it was nothing. It had the potential of being my favourite game of all times, but I encountered some pretty annoying inconsistencies with a handful of dialogue options and their consequences that spoiled the fun a bit for me, to the point that after completing the second act of the main story back in October I decided to take a break from the game. In January I basically played only the last act (the third one) and completed my first playthrough. Despite everything, when I finished the game I was so invested with the story that I was left with a feeling of loss that I hadn’t experienced since ages (most likely the last time was when I beat Planescape Torment for the 1st time about 20 years ago). So yeah, I have to admit my final opinion is that it’s a damn solid game and what I didn’t like of it, considering the vastness of the dialogue ramifications, were only minor fixable flaws.

Cyberpunk 2077
I don’t have a definite opinion yet. So far nothing particularly impressed me. I will try to complete it in February.