Pendragon

The premise is good but the execution is so so bad. I expect a storytelling tactical game, but it's more like chess with the way enemies and our characters behave. On Devastating difficulty, there's no way to win but to wait for the enemy makes mistakes, and they rarely do. One of my mistake playing them in the first hours is to not sacrifice your followers, but on higher difficulties you HAVE to make them.

While you can choose multiple Arthurian Mythical heroes at the start of the game, only some of them have their own unique skills which makes most of them interchangeable in combats. This makes Branwen the archer the only one standout among them. While Merlin is a non-combat character, the fact that he can only dodge enemies with his random teleportation skill. And that makes him unplayable in the early parts of harder difficulties.

And speaking of choosing Arthurian heroes, you can only unlocked the rest of them after meeting them in your run leaving Lancelot and Guinnevere as your starters. But some of them are painfully hard to find, if you're unlucky the path lead to them are blocked or you just choose the wrong dialogue. And during multiple runs you can only see the path to the same old Heroes over and over again. Grinding to unblocked them is the most tedious part of the game for me.

The pacing is terrible. The walk from one place to another is so slow. While different characters have different set of conversations, reading them over and over again is painful.

In the middle of my playing time, just by then I realized this game was created by Inkle, the same devs that makes 80 Days and Heaven's Vault. No wonder so few buzz this game have. It didn't have any guides on Steam or any other websites and the generic name makes them lost under Youtube SEO. The game is just not interesting enough, not well polished and basically not good enough..

Gemas I finished so far in 2025

- Legends of Grimrock (highest difficulty, my second playthrough)
- XCOM enemy within (replayed many times)
- Lands of lore 1
- Eye of the beholder 1 (first time replaying it since finishing it in the 90s)

Currently playing Eye of the beholder 2 (at the last tower).

As you all can see I am on a bit of a first person dungeon crawl-bender. Love these kind of games.

I am currently on the fence of playing the Ishar games after I finish the Beholder series. I have wanted to play these games since I read about the second game in a Amiga magazine back in the day. I remember wanting an Amiga so so bad after seeing this game. I re-read that article and looked at those picture so many times.

This was intended as a joke but on the topic of reading the last novel I read was probably something by Jo Nesbo. The last book I read was probably some self improvement type for work.

Well, the game does get unfair sometimes.
* Enemies can instant kill you, and resurrection is unreliable and can cause (hard-to-reverse) aging.
* Ambushes, where the enemies get a free round of attacks, can be particularly dangerous.
* Most unfair thing that happened to me, twice in my previous playthrough: Ambushed by a Bransly (a strange mid-air fish), which cast Miracle during the surprise round and teleported my party into sold rock. Do you think that's fair? (On the other hand, this particular enemy, while having other dangerous aspects and resistances, at least has low summon resistance.)
* Found a youtube video where, at one point, the party got ambushed by a single Archer Polete, who in the surprise round successfully drew the Priestess card, poisoning the entire party, then proceeded to Pursuit Sweep (free attack at the end of the round on all opponents under status ailments) the entire party, wiping out the entire party before the player could enter any commands.
* Save system? You can save at will, but when you reload a mid-dungeon save, some time passes, which can cause your characters to age. Not nearly as bad as how classic Wizardry handles it, but that still means there's a cost to reloading.

I have finished the main game before, and have on my current playthrough; it's just that there's some post-game content here.

As for things the game doesn't expect me to do, looking on a Japanese site I've learned of some glitches. In particular, I have the ability to trade equipment with special party members (including summons), and that in tern has provided me with a method of item duplication. There's also the fact that certain monsters, once required with spirit pact, will auto-equip items given to them; there's only one such monster that's not a pain to recruit, but with other monsters it leads to the possibility of having a bishop wearing a Holy Sabre as her body armor (the slot that would normally have robes or plate mail).

Resident Evil Village (Steam)

With the announcement of the next Resi game, Village also got a new lower sale price of A$14. That was good enough for me to finally play it and meet Lady D's breasts. Yes, I know where her eyes are, but when she's 9ft tall then where else are you going to be looking?

It's a great game. It continues my preferred first-person perspective from Resi 7- which I much prefer for this type of game when you're talking about traversing a fully 3D world. It follows straight on from the events of RE7, and the story is just as bat shit crazy. The story doesn't matter because the game play is the perfect Resident Evil- manage your ammo, fully explore and defeat bosses that look like they were created by pulling an Elephant inside out through its butt hole. All of that is combined with an awesome interconnected map consisting of a creepy village, a Castle and the immediate surrounds. Perfect horror game settings.

Add to that the fact that CAPCOM's RE Engine runs better than anything else in gaming and the developer's talent for making excellent character models...it's no wonder that CAPCOM are the only AAA publisher that seems to be growing since the industry crash after the COVID gaming boom ended and everyone went back outside their homes again (well, most of us have). Rest assured this one is as good as CAPCOMS recent remakes, probably better. I've already started NG+ on Hardcore Difficulty for a quick straight story run.

Edit: finished second Hardcore playthrough as well.

Wizordum - 3/5

Catacomb Abyss might have been the very first FPS I ever played. So, when I first saw this game, it hit a very specific nostalgia point for me.

Well, ultimately, Wizordum turned out to be less of a Catacomb tribute than I imagined and hoped for. But, aside a handful of bugs and questionable design decisions, I still enjoyed it.

For whatever reason, they decided to go for a very maximalist design philosophy: there's two different playable characters (each with their own loadouts), nine weapons (most with alt-fire modes), four spells, ten kinds of consumable items, a special attack, and a grenade-like explosive. There's even an upgrade shop. And let's not forget the pig-hunting bonus minigame levels that exist...for some reason.

Honestly, most of the items feel like filler (no, I don't want to throw a bottle a few tiles in front of me that creates a small toxic cloud that perhaps an enemy might walk into if I'm lucky). And to make matters worse, there's no way to map a shortcut to any of the items. If you want to use two different items during a hectic battle (and there's a lot of hectic battles), good luck trying to dodge fireballs *and* navigate your way through a list of ten items one by one...

There's also several weapons I barely used, and for the most part, the spells didn't really feel worth bothering with. Really, they could have pared things down a bit. So much of the game feels bloated and under-tested.

Anyway, I guess I'm sounding very down on the game, but there's still a lot to like about it. Overall, the core gameplay is still pretty good; it's very satisfying freezing enemies and then smashing them into pieces. Also, there's some excellent-looking sprites.

It's actually good to see I'm not the only one have that kind of habit in gaming

Gal*Gun: Double Peace

It's almost the same as my previous games, with this game also installed years ago. Back then I looked at my Steam library and notice that I got some PQube games that I hadn't played yet. This was the oldest amongst them. The slight difference is that I actually have finished all but one main ending. But I abandoned them with the intent to get it and also aiming to complete all the achievements. Funny it took me all this time to finally get back to it.

I don't consider myself an achievement hunter and I don't bother at all if a game have them or not. But if they do have them and I think it's possible for me to get them (like it didn't have an outrageous skill needed or a dreaded co-op achievement) then I have no problems trying to get them all. A 100% marks for me is a kind of a sign that I have no longer to look back at that particular game and move on to my other games in my PC.

Gal*Gun: Double Peace is a light ecchi rail shooter. No nudity, just a little game straight out of a dream of a horny teenage high school dream. The Japanese VAs are great with Yui Horie, the voice of the original Fruits Basket here as one of the main characters. That manga series especially Honda Tohru have place dear in my heart.

The most tedious thing to do is getting the Data Gatherer achievement. My steps to get them is not really efficient. I thought it would be plausible to get them via the attack mode, but some of them only possible to get if you have leftovers doki-doki mode power-ups. But I only realize the best way was to keeps multiple saves from the true ending playthrough and by time I understand that there are only 7 characters to go. So it took me longer than what I would've like but I don't really regret it

Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun. This was fine. You control a space marine wandering a planet besieged by Chaos and you have to kill everything. It's W40K jumping on the retro FPS trend and I would say it lands somewhere in the upper-middle of the pack compared to some of the others I've played. It also takes some influence from the Doom reboot, mainly in the sense that each level will involve at least one prolonged arena fight in which waves of enemies beam in as you exterminate others before you finally either just kill everything or put down a greater demon that needs to be killed to stop fresh enemies from coming in.

The graphics are fine in that crunchy 3D pixelated way, although there is a bit of weirdness in how the in-game graphics are significantly better than the pixel art slideshow cutscenes the play between chapters. For all its hilarious grimness, Warhammer is quite colorful and I felt the game represented that very well. I do feel the game could have used a bit more variety in the audio. Enemies generally lack personality (especially when you compare it to something like the orks in Space Marine) and I often struggled to single out what was attacking me or approaching from my blind sides. Also, the soundtrack SUCKS. It's not very long and what there is of it just isn't very pleasant to listen to. It isn't catchy, and its attempts at epic moments fall completely short. It's the worst game music I've heard in quite a while.

I played the main game on medium difficulty and then moved up to hard for the expansion, and I would say the game probably plays best on hard, like many FPSs do. I am a bit embarrassed to say that for some reason I forgot you could sprint in the game, maybe because the game emphasizes how heavy your character is (you can squash enemies if you fall directly on top of them). I kept getting killed in the very last level of the expansion, not understanding what I should do, then I realized I could try holding the shift button down and suddenly everything got easier and I finished the game about 10 minutes later. D'oh!