Postal: Brain Damaged: Much more fun than I was expecting. A great shooter with a nice array of weapons and a very clever map design!
Evil West: A third-person action game in some kind of steampunk-western setting. A lot of fun, good combat system challenging but really fair. It had some minor bugs but nothing game breaking.
The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition: One of my favorite ARPGs. I played the original version but when the SC Edition came out, I started it completely over and I didn't regret it :)
Trine 4 + DLC: Well, it's Trine, not too much to say. The worlds are beautiful as can be and the puzzles really require some out-of-the-box thinking. It was a lot of fun but before I start with Trine 5, I'll take a break from 2.5D puzzle games :)

Finished The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Man of Medan and I liked it. It is a bit of explorations, dialogue choices, QTEs but it does all of that quite well in order to tell a good story. It is not for everyone though as it is quite scary. It's the reason I probably won't play other games in the series except Little Hope which is already in my Steam library.

Full list here.

Frog Detective The Entire Mystery, Oct 24 (Xbox Game Pass)-A fun little adventure game with a funny little Frog Detective and a lighthearted plot. It plays a lot like the old Mixed Up Mother Goose game where you basically have to get various items to each character to progress. Not particularly deep gameplay or anything but an enjoyable way to spend a few hours and I liked it a lot more than Turnip Boy.

Full List

Guns, Gore & Cannoli: A super fun 2D platformer/shooter. I've finished this game on Switch years ago and it's so good to see both games here on GoG. The game is rather short, I've finished it in about 3:30 hours but I was having a blast again! :)

Beyond: Two Souls was a big disappointment for me. Not only I expected more after Heavy Rain, but story is really terrible, first asking about my decision and then ignoring it. Jumps in time with story mean, that first you are kind to somebody in latter time, just to find out, that secondly he was hurting you in earlier time… Last third of the game was real pain for me. Sometimes I should go somewhere, but camera was aiming to my face, so I had no idea where I am going (and it was resisting when I wanted looked elsewhere). Moreover in base underwater were some invisible walls, so it stopped me in the middle of nothing, although I was going in proper direction. On the other hand, I must admit, that game has real American feeling where story takes place. I wish, that Detroit would be much better...

Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2 + Mysteries of the Sith expansion pack

Finally finished the last mission in the expansion pack. I must have started the base game over a year ago, finished it some months ago and slowly played the expansion pack.

I guess the slow pace reveals it wasn't that exciting to me. I guess the age of the game shows, but I just generally didn't care that much for the levels, story or gameplay. It was ok-ish, but meh.

A couple of notable things I didn't like in the game:

1. Finding the level secrets, preferably all of them, is quite important as that is the only way to get "stars" to improve your force powers. To get the maximum number of stars, you have to find all secrets. I did find all the secrets but still there was no abundance of stars, I still had to think carefully which powers I want to learn properly, especially in the expansion pack.

In many levels this was quite irritating as there were points in many levels after which you couldn't go back towards the start of the level. So if you missed some secret before that point, you either have to load a save before that point, or restart the whole level.

2. The light saber combat was not as exciting as I hoped. At first I was totally lost how you were supposed to fight with the lightsaber (with other lightsaber wielding enemies) without constantly getting killed, by trial and error I learned that the most successful tactic is to try to run past your enemies swinging your saber, hoping it hits the enemy at the back while you run. Rinse and repeat. If it hits from the front, the enemy just seems to block it every time.

Overall I would have hoped the lightsaber combat would have been more tactical or something, with proper blocking and timing.

Anyway, now it is done. That game must have been in my backlog for like 20 years. :D Just like Blood Omen which I finished last week.

Persona 4 Golden (XSX Game Pass)

Finished it to the true ending, which required maxing out all relationships and completing two final optional dungeons. It's not a bad persona game, but it lacks the great handmade dungeons of 5 and I thought the more serious and darker story of 3 was better as well. Compared to the first three games this is where the series truly breaks away from the core Shin Megami Tensei series and really becomes a standalone series with more emphasis on the relationship and persona building rather than dungeon crawling. Once you get your head around the time management aspect, the actual character building is deceptively deep, and a full understanding is required if you want to play at the higher difficulties.

As always, the style, presentation and music are pretty much spot on. Still, I think Persona 5 is the best place to try the series for anyone that has never played one of these games.

Call of Cthulhu: Shadow of the Comet. This is an interesting Lovecraftian adventure game. The story is the usual thing: dweeby protagonist goes to isolated New England fishing town and finds that All Is Not As It Seems. Most of the locals are jerks and there's something going on in the woods. The twist is that this game ties in with the Halley's Comet hysteria of the mid-80s...a few years late, but there's something connecting the comet's passing with the coming of the Great Old Ones.

As an adventure game, there are things I really like and dislike about it. The interface (which I think was carried over from Eternam?) has a nice feature where objects you can interact with are highlighted with sight lines between them and the hero, so you won't overlook them, and if you have an inventory object placed in the use box, you'll automatically use it in the proper place when you move into it. This should cut down on pixel hunting. Unfortunately, perhaps because of bugginess, the sight line feature doesn't always work and there were times when I basically was doing the right thing but the game wasn't recognizing that, which lead me to believe I was doing the wrong thing, bang my head against a wall for a bit, then consult a walkthrough to realize I was on the right track the first time but I needed to repeat certain actions to get the game to work right. The engine also lacks an intuitive way to combine objects in inventory, and there were times in the game when I felt like the story was pulling ahead of me in the sense that I was doing actions that were advancing things without fully understanding why. It's that area where adventure game logic clashes with storytelling. Maybe it's because the game is French.

The voice acting is pretty bad, and the actors' attempts to shout out cultish language are just hilarious, but the graphics are generally pretty nice and I liked how the game used close-ups during dialogue scenes because I would try to figure out which actors they were based on.

What the game excels at is in just creating a good Lovecraftian atmosphere. You definitely feel like a vulnerable person in a hostile place where you're not certain whom to trust. The game generally nails the usual Lovecraftian tropes and it did it in a time when that was rare in games (still is, really). There are a couple of points where it breaks immersion - one section requires you to use a pair of wax wings to glide to safety from a high place like you're Icarus, which would fit in fine with a King's Quest game but is just silly here - but for the most part the game has a consistent tone.

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Secret of the Silver Earring. It took me a while to try this one because I've always read mixed reviews of it, but having finally played it I was pretty impressed. Sherlock and Watson are invited to an event where a construction mogul is shot dead and his daughter has been framed. Of course, the heroes get involved with the case and find out what really happened and why.

Technically, the game shows its age. The protagonists sometimes have trouble navigating rooms because they move like early generation Sims walk, where they have to deliberately pause and turn before moving forward in a direction, and the environments have that sterile feeling you still saw in 3D games of that period.

I liked the feature where the game is divided into days/chapters, and at the end of each you would be given a quiz where you had to collate evidence found and sort it correctly to advance. In theory this should help you keep up with the twists and turns of the case but I found that I was still lagging in my understanding of things because instead of reasoning things out as intended, I was just acting like an adventure game player and doing as much as needed just to get the game to move forward. The outcome was that when the game concluded and I was asked to identify who killed whom, I was baffled to discover that I didn't even remember half of the victims or suspects. I was only ever thinking of the main guy at the beginning and who killed him, not worrying too much about the other victims who pile up as the game continues. Fortunately, it's optional to have the entire case sorted out because Sherlock does it for you in the final cinematic.

Beyond my futility as a detective, I thought the story was pretty interesting and it resolved in a way befitting a Sherlock Holmes story. Lots of easily overlooked details that all come together in a reasonable way. The game's depiction of Holmes and the regular characters is basically faithful to the original stories, although the voice acting is on the broad, hammy side. The guy playing Sherlock was dead on, though.

Halo Reach, Nov 1 (Xbox Game Pass)-I'm not sure if I liked Reach or ODST more but both are far better than Halo 1-3 in my opinion. The story was somewhat interesting and the missions were pretty fun and varied with the exception of a couple of vehicle levels. I prefer the squad narrative and gameplay in this game as opposed to the other games in the series which are mostly solo affairs. By now I'm getting rather sick of the weapons and the enemies since I've seen them for 5 games so far. But still it was a fun shooter.

Full List

Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened. Much like the Silver Earring, this is a game I'd been slow to try because from afar it looked like a gimmicky "Holmes vs. Cthulhu!" crossover when they could have just been making regular Sherlock Holmes games. Maybe it still is a gimmick, but they actually did a really good job with it. The trick is that they adapted Lovecraft's work to Holmes instead of the other way around, so the story plays out with Holmes and Watson following a regular case that simply gets a bit weirder than usual. There's some grisly stuff they come across and some suggestions of something supernatural occurring, but for the most part, it's Holmes uncovering the actions of a Lovecraftian cult and putting a stop to it. At no point do Holmes and Watson start fighting fish people or struggle with their sanity (unless you count Watson having some nightmares) or any of those usual cliches.

And the way they do it puts a fresh, respectful spin on Lovecraft's work, too. By keeping all the excesses a ways off-screen and keeping within the rational, dry world Holmes lives in, the suggestions of Lovecraft's work come across as more ominous and unnerving than you see in so many other adaptations where the creators go overboard with slime and tentacles to compensate for the fact that Lovecraft's stories do tend to be a bit dry - a lot of them do involve people letting their imaginations take them away after reading old books or seeing strange objects, after all. I would say this is one of the better Lovecraft games I've played.

It's a more traditional adventure game than the previous one. There are still times when you're supposed to input something to show you've paid attention and studied the clues, but it's not as demanding this time and most of the action is just looking around, finding stuff, and using it in the right places like so many other point and click games. The toughest puzzles for me were the code-breaking ones, but there aren't too many of those, thankfully, and the game comes with a built-in hint system similar to the old "highlight the answer" Infocom hint books, so that was nice whenever I needed something to get me going a bit.

The voice acting is along the same lines as the prior game, and the graphics are a little better but still pretty dry-looking, although I think that plays in the game's favor in terms of keeping it grounded as a Holmes adventure. I saw a trailer for the remake of this game and, although I won't pass judgment until I play it, it didn't look very good to me. Excessive in the ways I mentioned above (and Holmes and Watson apparently get Young And Sexy at some point in this franchise). The movement is the only real sore spot for me, as navigating the game world can be slow and cumbersome, sometimes requiring switching back and forth from 1st person to 3rd person viewing.

Dead Space (XSX Game Pass)

The new remaster...or is it a remake? I classify a remaster as a game where everything is identical to the original- just better graphics, UI improvements, controls etc. A remake changes gameplay to some degree. With those definitions, this is a soft remake. It's mostly the same, but some scenes have been totally remade- the main one being the asteroid shooting segment which is now completely different. There are also dialogue touchups, like the main female character being portrayed as less bitchy and snarky. Isaacs girlfriend has taken a mild "uglification" hit as is common in new games- I think the running rule of thumb is that no character in a modern western game is allowed to be more attractive than any female member of the dev team.

It does play better than the original, that much is certain. My previous experience is the Xbox 360 version which I played three times, including impossible difficulty. You could argue that the older lower quality grainy graphics help the atmosphere- I know that sounds a bit odd, but I did start up one of my old 360 saves just to compare and something was lost. However, I'll still take this smoother and sharper version any day.

Otherwise, it's still an excellent and atmospheric ride. As the first game in the series the tropes hadn't set in and become so tiresome- like how every time you hit a plot switch or pick up a plot item a swarm of space zombies come through vents. It just got too predictable in the sequels...I mean if you can't see the pattern after the first 40 times and prepare, then you have a learning disorder. I played on the medium difficulty which provides a tense experience for the first play through. I've decided to play a speed run on the story difficulty for NG+, mainly just to pick up a few collectibles and achievements.

Black Mirror 2, Nov 5 (GOG)-It's a pretty solid point and click adventure game. It's probably a little too long and a little too easy. I never really had problems figuring out what to do and where to go and most of the puzzles were solved with items in the same room or one screen away. The voice acting was atrocious though and the mixing of dialog and music/sound effects was really inconsistent even after I turned everything but the voices down. And Darren was quite possibly the least likeable main character I've ever played. Complete asshole the entire game. The plot was fun building on the previous game and setting up the sequel with a big cliffhanger. Not a bad game for those that like the genre and can get past the main character.

Full List

Some fmv from the Humble Bundle of Wales Interactive:

The Bunker
Good story with plot twist included, poor controls. The most similar to an adventure game of all of them.

The Complex
More an interactive movie but quite decent, good characters and well filmed. A pitty that the adventure is very linear and the finals are disappointed.

Late Shift (i have it on gog too, please gog bring us more fmv´s)
A bit under of the Complex, it has some different ways and ends are very different.

All of them have about 2 hours of gameplay, are more like movies but are well done and recommended. I played on Deck on the bed, so they are quite relaxing.

Full list

Amid Evil: The Black Labyrinth. It's an expansion/prequel for Amid Evil. It's the same thing and it's still good. A couple of new weapons, and in keeping with how the base game goes all the enemies are original to this campaign. The levels are very impressive in their scale and as with the base game I just appreciate how colorful it is. I think the final boss here is more challenging than any of the ones in the base game, but perhaps I'm forgetting someone.

Burnhouse Lane

This one gave me the vibes of ‘The cat lady in Silent Hill’. As far as I understand, the game had been originally developed as a direct sequel to The cat lady, but they changes the direction during development.
The graphics and music are good, the storyline is fine.
The puzzles tend to be more tedious than difficult, but are fine overall.
The final chapter stood out like a sore thumb to me, but maybe it was supposed to be this way.
The only negatives I found was the melee combat and the cat platforming; both of which are rather clunky.