I had to drop it and return to it a few times over the course of a month.

Huh, thought those were huge time sinks, but 14h would make it short, and seems to be right the mean time as per HLtB... Of course, what a typical player finishes in 14h would take me 40+ most probably, for the games that have in-game timers if I happen to check HLtB after I finish I tend to fly well past the longest time listed there, and in-game timers usually don't count reloads. But still, not what I expected, admittedly without having checked in the least.

The Rogues of Quinn Part 3 - Quinn's Infiltrator (NWN:EE, Review)

This is a game where you have to read the manual and make notes to help save you some time. I can see ppl getting lost easily and having to restart or back track. I try to only play SP games with under 20 hours to complete. Anything more than that I tap out.

Finished a few more:
- A Plague Tale: Innocence: A real good game with an interesting story and gameplay. Don't bother if you don't like linear games though.
- Serial Cleaner: I was a bit surprised by this one. I didn't expect anything but ended up liking it and going to the end. Difficulty is just right and gameplay good.
- Rayman Origins: I really liked the first worlds. It became too difficult in the last worlds and almost quit the game. It becomes too much die & retry near the end and it was not fun anymore.

Full list here.

Finished Final DOOM: TNT - Evilution for the first time.

I've steadily been going through all four commercial releases of DOOM from the 90s for the first time. TNT Evilution is an incredible campaign, and the longest so far. I think I enjoyed it more than DOOM II. Easily some of the best level design and has the most variety in scenery. Certain levels are just epic. Great enemy placement, too.
Only Plutonia Experiment remains.

While Plutonia Experiment doesn't look as shiny as TNT, it has some of the most insane and fun level design Doom 2 has to offer. Optimized for pure gameplay flow, nothing else.

Funny, thase are all the reasons I quit playing Max Max. The setting is awesome, driving works fine but it's just such a slog to get through. What pissed me of the most were those mobile-like notifications popping up all over the game. I guess I'm getting too old for this shit.

She Sees Red - Interactive Movie (2019) (Linux/Wine)

KInd of like it – for being made in Russia, for being well-done FMV and quite an interesting story. The game is short, but second playthrough (with different choices) is a must as it reveals more and helps to understand what's going on here. Not worth the full price, but with a current discount it makes a nice evening with beer and crisps ;)
I got some issues playing the game under Linux (not starting with Nvidia drivers, solved by switching to Intel, but it still crashed 2-3 times).

List of all games completed in 2021.

Kingdom Hearts, April 23 (PS2)-I have mixed feelings about this one. It was fun and I enjoyed it but it didn't live up to nearly 20 years of hype in my mind. But without those 20 years of hype built up I don't think I would have played this at all.

The game plays and feels like an intro to Final Fantasy. It was fun seeing all the characters and visiting all the Disney worlds but each world was so small that I felt like I was rushing through them all. It also would have been nice to have the Disney characters visit other worlds but quashed that hope early on.

There were some issues gameplay issues as well. The camera control was terrible which made some platforming really difficult. About midway through the game I had gotten used to it but early on it was really frustrating (mushroom hopping in Wonderland specifically). The nearly endless spawning of enemies also got really old until I couldn't beat the final boss and needed to grind a couple more levels.

Somehow though despite the juvenile feeling and some clunky gameplay I still enjoyed myself. Its not quite the masterpiece its usually described as but its a fun play with some familiar characters.

Full List

Risen

There really isn't much to say about Risen, it's really just a copy of Gothic 1/2, slightly modernized, a bit more forgiving and overall just not as good. While I understand that the years before the release of Risen were rough for Piranha Bytes and they wanted to play it safe, the game is almost a decade after Gothic 1 just not very impressive. It's a solid game, not a bad one, it just doesn't stand out in any way.

Finally beat The Last of Us: Part II two days ago. FINALLY.

For once I'm gonna keep it short: gameplay-wise it's TLoU 1 with crawling in grass. Story-wise: it's a 30-hour game with a script that could barely fill a feature-length film. The game starts out strong, then there's 20 hours of nothing, and finally, when you're already sick and tired of the nothingness, the game suddenly remembers that there should be an actual story with character development and stuff and then you get 10 hours that are actually meaningful and where you finally get to see places that don't seem like they were copied over from the TLoU 1 remaster. The end.

In more interesting news: I did my second playthrough of Eric Chahi's From Dust today, this time on PS3. It's still good. My biggest complaint is still that it lacks in content. You can beat the story mode in a single afternoon but that's kind of a good thing because by the time you reach the final levels you feel like you've already seen everything that the game has to offer. Briefly put, it's a "small" Populous or Black & White clone that is more puzzle than strategy but has physics simulations that are pretty impressive to this day.

Also, if you like From Dust I highly recommend Chahi's newest game, Paper Beast, which is surprisingly similar to From Dust despite being a first-person game (originally designed as a VR-exclusive but by now also playable without VR, at least on PC).

Venetica (thanks again to Clairsentient for the game!)

There will be a review... eventually, so for now I'll just say that the concept is interesting, but the implementation leaves plenty to be desired. Still, an all right game that can be enjoyable if you know how to deal with the bugs and make the right choices throughout. But it is buggy, most notably the risk of vanishing NPCs if you save in an area with NPCs one making you only go to empty places to save, plenty of clipping and issues with hit detection, annoying camera, also annoying how restricted the movement is. Also don't like the unclear outcomes of some choices and that the ending is determined by the (mainly dialogue) choices made throughout. But at least it's very forgiving, and at least after you get a couple of twilight energy charges it'd take a rather determined effort to get a game over, so you can just go through it and find what you enjoy... Even if that's combat, since some enemies respawn, so you can clear most areas but also know where to go if you do want to grind.

Finished Wednesday, kept putting off posting.

After recently played great Silent Hill 4 I decided to play game which maybe started this genre Alone in the Dark (1). Although this games is from 1992 I played it without problems. At the beginning it was important find out how this game should be played (= save → try → die → load)… Only a few battles after game starts were annoying, but later it was ok. From today perspective sudden deaths could be omitted. Apart from that game is really good, in my opinion can be still considered as “above average”.

25.04.2021. - Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception (PS3)

I've beaten the game on Normal difficulty.
The story is based on (at least to me) less known myth than the first two games. The game itself is much more off the rails than the first two games too, kinda like the F&F franchise went from "could happen" (until it really couldn't) to "batshit running with tank through the downtown". The shooting was much less satisfactory than in its predecessors, with enemies taking half a billion bullets before they kneel over and die. Hitting them with bare fists proved to be a MUCH faster way of disposing of them, usually requiring few hits to kill them as opposed to 50 million bullets. Controls felt more slippery than before too with me falling to death because I've slipped.
On the plus side, the story is still cool, and it's still Uncharted, so it's not bad, I just found it worse than the previous incarnations.