The 2020 thread is now up, feel free to reserve your post there!
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_finished_in_2020

Rise of the Tomb Raider

Well, I really liked this game quite a lot but the performance was much, much worse than the previous one and that really coloured my judgment quite a lot. I had to turn down quite a few options which I probably shouldn't have to do on my rather beastly machine. Also, the cut scenes and some of the levels kept lagging for, I'm not making this up, 5 seconds. I went all over the internet and tried many things, yet the only thing I found to work was turning off DX12.

OK, Apart from all of that I did enjoy the game, it was a roller coaster of both action and even emotions (at times). The graphics, when they worked, were lovely. The gun-play and hunting were just as good as before but that's part of the trouble. The game, as good as it is, was a bit too similar to the previous one, which was of course a great game. However, I feel that's not quite a good enough (same game but worse performance and several bugs).

Oh well, I still loved the game and I'm really glad that it was just Lara on her own this time rather than her annoying team.

Recommended!

Thronebreaker. Somehow though, i found it much more interesting, than Gwent itself. I am even tempted to try the unlocked cards in Gwent, but i don't know...

Jazz Jackrabbit 2 so far only original game. Jazz 2 is evolution of original idea with improved game mechanics. Still I like first one more.

Haimrik

Without any doubt the game is very original and it would be hard to compare it to other games. Sadly, apart from originality the game is below average in every other aspect.

The core mechanics - being able to summon things from words - is a huge waste of potential. The game itself praises the power of words but you, as a player, will not really see it. Everything is very linear so you don't have any freedom of creation. You just need to solve the puzzle that is in front of you and you have to do it in one specific way. Some of these puzzles are nice and funny I must admit but they soon become very similar to each other: first check which words you can summon, try combining a few items, solve the puzzle. Sometimes you'll die after triggering something bad. In most cases it's not a big deal but it can also be kinda frustrating to repeat the whole stage over and over again (boss fights are particularly tedious and not really entertaining).

Many puzzles involve arcade-y sections where you have to run, jump, dodge, aim and fire. Controls are very clunky and it's not fun at all to repeat a particular section again just because you couldn't see that a projectile is on your level.

The game has a minor problem with its atmosphere. It starts as a silly tale of a scribe drooling over a tavern owner with many goofy moments (beer race, lioness dreaming about unlimited supply of human hands etc.). A bit later the game suddenly starts to be more serious and even dark.

So yeah, nothing really special here beside the general concept. The game is not too long though so I still think you may give it a try, especially considering the current discount. Just don't expect anything special.


Full list

And it seems my last game this year is the Baba Yaga DLC for Rise of the Tomb Raider. I really enjoyed that DLC with an interesting story and some "new" gameplay elements.

Full list here.

supposed to have 16 hours of gaming time today + tomorrow.

wont happen tough, family emergency so no gaming :(

Particle Fleet: Emergence 2019-01-03
Dungeon Warfare 2019-01-04
Hyperdevotion Noire: Goddess Black Heart 2019-01-17
A Story About My Uncle 2019-01-29
Styx: Master of Shadows 2019-02-18
Alien Shooter 2: Reloaded 2019-02-24
Ys II 2019-03-03
Moon Hunters 2019-03-05
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2019-03-09
VVVVVV 2019-06-26
Braid 2019-06-29
Tomb Raider II 2019-07-09
Tomb Raider II: The Golden Mask 2019-07-18
Immortal Planet 2019-09-10
Shadows: Awakening 2019-09-17
Cat Quest 2019-09-18
Deep Sky Derelicts 2019-09-29
SOMA 2019-10-03
F.E.A.R. 3 2019-10-09
Princess Remedy in a World of Hurt 2019-10-15
Princess Remedy in a Heap of Trouble 2019-10-16
Alan Wake's American Nightmare 2019-10-31
Warstone TD 2019-11-10
Lords of the Fallen 2019-12-04
Trillion 2019-12-09
Tales from Candlekeep: Tomb of Annihilation 2019-12-16
Bad North: Jotunn Edition 2019-12-21

Became quite a list afterall. When I got hung up on Warframe in March for 3 month, I didn't think, I would finish that many games. And my current game, Mark of the Ninja, takes a backseat to some quality level grinding in Grim Dawn.
edit: and posting removed all the empty spaces that align the dates correctly, fantastic....

Aligning with spaces only works with monospaced fonts (like Courier). Did you make it in Notepad first?

Nah, copied from my google docs form and then added the spaces by hand -.-

Not even then on pages, since HTML merges multiple spaces into one.

I meant in general, not only on this forum. ;-)

Well I'm not going to finish Pillars of Eternity today, so that's it for the year. Going back through what I played this year, I'm not only shocked to find that I finished 82 games (!), but just how many of them were big 40 plus hour games too. Probably the best year of games played ever for quality...so much so my usual yearly top 5 has to be top 10. A year so good that my top 5 this year would all be in my top 20 games of all time. Also odd how many are Japanese games, I used to not like Japanese games way back, but now it seems they are my favourites.

1. Dark Souls 3 (XB1X)
2. NieR: Automata (XB1X)
3. Nioh (PS4Pro)
4. Kingdom Come: Deliverance (XB1X)
5. Persona 5 (PS4Pro)
6. Valkyria Chronicles 4 (XB1X)
7. The Witcher 3 GOTY (XB1X)
8. God of War (PS4Pro)
9. Gears 5 (XB1X)
10.The Outer Worlds (XB1X)

Best small studio/indie game: Operencia: The Stolen Sun (XB1X)

Worst game finished: Resident Evil 5 (XB1X)

Most disappointing: Spider-Man (PS4Pro) (not bad, just didn't live up to the hype and ended up feeling like a tech demo or a movie)

Best Music: NieR: Automata

Last game finished in this decade:

198X

+ very good presentation:
awesome pixel art
great music and sounds
genuine 80's atmosphere
nice melancholic cinematics/cutscenes
decent writing
good voice-acting by Maya Tuttle

+/- There's some confusion about the main character's gender, due to the female voice for the male looking character, despite all efforts to make it sound neutral (it's kind of strained). It's probably intentionally to be as inclusive as possible, and I wouldn't have a problem with a game about a lesbian or transgender gamer, but it's kind of weird that while this is so blatantly confusing, the game never addresses it (although it felt like the elephant in the room to me). If the intention was to make even supposedly open gamers question their preconception about gender, I guess they succeeded, to an extent, but what does it have to do with the 80's arcade escapism plot? The game gives no answer to that. Instead of making the experience relatable for everyone, I thought it somewhat distracted from the universal aspects of the story. But YMMV.
+/- The game is very short; five different arcade game sections, connected by longer cutscenes; took me around 2 hours to complete, and only because a lot of that time was spent on repeating parts that I struggled with (mostly the fourth game "Shadowplay", which has 5 stages you need to complete in one session).

- The arcade games sections are obstacles to overcome in order to advance the story, and stylistically they're pretty cool, but the gameplay is a bit simple and the controls kind of sub-par at times. These mini-games were alright (except for the last one, which was boring), but I didn't think they were that much fun to play on their own.
- The story just ends "to be continued ...", it had its moments but ultimately it's unfinished and unsatisfying (there are also some loose threads, like a girl the kid admits to admire but which is never mentioned again afterwards).
- No settings/options menu, no way to reconfigure keys (don't know about gamepad support, if there is any)
- No saving on quitting the game; just 'bookmarks' for each of the minigames you've unlocked. You have unlimited Continues - if you die, depending on the game, you just respawn where you fell (which feels a bit cheap) or you have to repeat the level or the section after the last checkpoint (which can be a little annoying, when the checkpoints are far apart), but if you quit the game, you have to start the last arcade game section from scratch (the thought of which is most scary for "Shadowplay"). I guess it's fitting for a game about arcades, but personally I did not like it much.
- No replaying the cutscenes from the menu, only option is to replay the mini-games (minor complaint compared to the others).

All in all, this game confirmed three of my preconceptions:
1. Pixel art is awesome and it was worth saving it into the new millenium.
2. Arcade gameplay without today's conveniences and which mostly requires you to memorize the level layout and repeat until you manage an (almost) perfect run definitely is not. I really don't miss it. But YMMV.
3. Episodic releases are kind of disappointing.

Ion Fury

Phew, managed to beat it before new year :]
Great game, with DUSK it's best retro FPS I've played. Hectic action, lot of secrets that are easy to miss and arsenal where every gun is useful, even revolver helps in latest levels. Funny that there is a device to find secrets, that you need to find in the secrets :]

Only downside - music. Forgettable. It's in the background but that's it.