2016 Game Year Recap

Looking back this year there are plenty of nice games (because I don’t really keep playing bad ones) but a few are clearly above the rest.

Fallout Shelter

Review

Let’s Play – The Nightmare on Vault 666:
Day One
Day Two
Day Three
Day Four
Day Five
Day Six
Day Seven
Day Eight
Rant: 10 Things I Learned About Fallout Shelter
The End of the Second Week
Third Week
Fourth Week
Fifth and Final Week

Free2play Mobile Bunch

Lately I’ve been “taking it easy” and trying out some mobile games. I’m not a huge fan of mobile gaming in general, but my daughter got me back to farming in Hay Day. Then I almost accidentally tried something else too, and there I was: hooked on a bunch of mobile games. And while these games are from super casual to pretty casual, I’m personally never able to play anything completely casually, if I keep playing something, the obsession is born, and it doesn’t go away easily.

I will be writing short reviews for the following mobile games (and include links here when they are ready):

Clash Royale
Dungeon Boss
Fallout Shelter
Hay Day
Neko Atsume
Plants vs. Zombies.

All of these games have plenty of free content, and a number of other good sides. But of course some are better than the others.

2015 Game Year Recap

Even though I had some dry spells from gaming, I actually managed to play a decent amount of new games last year. This post is just a short recap of my played games, titles linking to the individual reviews.

Kickstarting Psychological Horror

Once again there are several promising games looking to be funded through Kickstarter. I checked some of them out and will give a few short recommendations here. These titles are united by a dark horror themes and are meant for mature players. They are being done by people that aren’t native English speakers so the language might not be perfect in all places, but I consider the artistic vision and atmosphere more important anyway.

Old School Adventuring On Kickstarter

I’ve been very happy about Kickstarter and other crowd-funding sites making so many good and great adventures happen in the past few years. And while my initial enthusiasm has died down – and I’m not alone on this – there are great projects emerging almost every day still.

This time I picked a couple of projects that have been introduced by the makers themselves in Adventure Gamers forum.

The Drawn Trilogy

Score: 7.0
(7+)
Drawn – The Painted Tower 2009
Drawn – Dark Flight 2010
Drawn – Trail of Shadows 2011

The Drawn trilogy is probably the most well known and praised of the adventure games tagged as ‘casual’. And while the series is indeed casual, it’s not to be mixed up with the hidden object games. These games are definitely adventure games, though they are heavier on the puzzles than the narrative. I also think the series deserves the praise it has been given, even though I eventually didn’t end up scoring it very high.

The Best Games I Played in 2014 – Part 2

Going through the list was a lot more work than I originally thought. I didn’t have a thing written down most of these games and I only started taking screenshots quite recently, so I had to go back to some of the titles just for that. And then I didn’t even have savegames for all of them. Well, these shots should give some kind of idea anyway.

The whole top10 ended up being rather traditional adventures, visual novels or hybrids of them. I did play some other type of games too but I’m not sure I finished any (not that they were bad, they’re just longer). I can’t really anticipate what my top10 for 2015 would look like but at the current rate it’s probably going to have even more visual novels.

My top5 or 2014:

The Best Games I Played in 2014 – Part 1

I’m not one of those people who immediately plays every promising looking game when they come out. Because I’ve been absorbed in The World of Warcraft the last ten years, I’ve skipped so many interesting games that I’ve lost count. So I always have a couple of hundred titles on my backlog. Then I just pick something I feel like playing and go for it. So my top games for any year, or game reviews in general, will most likely not be about brand new titles. That being said, I noticed that my best games of 2014 all ended up being titles from the last few years anyway.

I’m probably going to write a bit more about the top 5, but first, here’s the titles from 6 to 10: