Voodoo Detective (2022) (Linux)

I really liked it. It's nothing amazing perhaps, but it has anything old-school point&click adventure should have: great atmosphere, wonderful music, pretty graphics and animations and – last but not least – smart sense of humour! It really (but: really!) feels like adventures from the golden era.

Supports linux.

List of all games completed in 2026.

The Medium (Steam)

I actually played this on Xbox when it released as part of Game Pass. That version looked and sounded great, but was locked to 30fps- this is a demanding game at points. I really like it, hence I managed to find a code for the game for quite cheap (I think it was a Humble Bundle game at one point).

The game is still demanding. With all settings at highest, but not using ray tracing (waste of performance, the games baked in lighting is amazing) the game ran around 60 percent GPU usage...until you hit the dual screen segments where it jumps to 100 percent. This game is literally rendering two screens at once when you're traversing both worlds at once. It's a great looking and sounding game though. No one does moody forests better than Bloober Team.

I really like the setting and story. Set near Cracow, it heavily references Communist Poland even though it is set post Communism. I know some people hate it for the inconclusive ending that leaves a final major choice up to the players imagination. But I think this sort of horror game should be like that. I suppose some people prefer endings with confetti and fluffy bunnies. Then again, I always thought the ending to Mass Effect 3 was fine as well. Anyway, I think The Medium is easily Bloober Teams best effort from a developer that seems to improve slightly with each release.

Sherlock Holmes The Devil's Daughter, Jan 5 (GOG)-This was a big letdown compared to Crimes and Punishments. I'm not sure if this game was actually worse or I just gave a pass to the first one for its flaws. This game was full of QTEs and minigames. With the exception of the terrible lockpicking I don't remember that from the first game. The cases were also less interesting although there was an overarching 'mystery' developing even if the cases weren't at all related. The game just felt very sloppy in all aspects compared to Crimes and Punishments.

Full List

Darkwood (2017) (Linux)

I've dropped this one. Atmosphere and sound is awesome, but controls and combat system are frustrating as hell. I also don't like obsessive management of items that are limited in number or duration. And, as one of reviews says, "game becomes repetitive very soon, inventory management is a pain, tedium kills immersion". Life is too short to play games that aren't fun.

List of all games completed in 2026.

Finished The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark and I was a bit disappointed. It was average, not as good as the previous one. Some episodes were good but others were too difficult.

Also finished Star Wars: The Force Unleased which was quite average. There are a bunch of useless stuff (light character improvements like a light-RPG, unlockable combos...) but combat can almost always be handled by storming the enemies without any thinking. Story is quite ininteresting. Go for it if you are a Star Wars otherwise you can skip it and find something better to play :)

Full list here

Saturnalia (Epic)

Made by the same developer as the recent Horses, which is why I decided to play it as well. A quick look through my library of free Epic games showed I already had it! It's an excellent game. It is mainly survival horror where you can swap between 4 protagonists that work together to solve the mystery in a Sardinian village and escape. You are tracked by some sort of creature related to the towns curse.

The game also has a rogue-like aspect- when all four characters die, then the village resets into a different layout but you keep all the clues that you have found. The town is like a maze. Eventually you piece together how to escape and get rated for your ending. I managed to work out how to get all four characters to survive, though I had to do a deliberate party wipe out to reset the town and regain all characters to be able to get them all to survive otherwise I could have just escaped with only 2 characters instead.

The game runs really well and has a great art style...BUT I found the rough stop motion style of character animations to be really distracting so turned it off in the graphics menu. Best game I've played this year! Out of all 4 of them so far.

The Silver Case, Jan 7 (GOG)-I thought this was a game with an interesting plot plagued by terrible dialog. But after a few hours of playing I realized this is a game with a terrible plot that also happens to have terrible dialog. Its got a plot that is a bad mix of David Lynch and the Monster anime/manga with dialog so awful it reads like a bad Abbott and Costello skit. "Gameplaywise' it would have been better off as a straight visual novel but mercifully the game elements aren't too onerous. Particularly weird design decisions include a travel screen everytime you change locations that is just a line highlighted on a grid map and having to talk to a pet turtle to advance the story. There are also endless transition screens between areas beyond even the travel screen. There is also a 100 question quiz in the middle of the game. I'm not sure if you need to answer any of the questions correctly to continue but that's the kind of game this is.

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Half Life Blue Shift (Steam)

I started it last year, quit it because it was crappy, started again, quit again, started again today and finally finished it. It's only 5 hours long, but I still had to beat in three chunks. I like it better than the base game...only because its shorter. That only leaves Opposing Force to play in the the regular Half Life and HL2 series.

Dark Cloud 2: Dark Chronicle (11th January)
The Exit 8 (26th January)
Bloodborne: GOTY Edition (30th January)

Art Of Rally (13th February)
Luigi's Mansion 3 (19th February)
Wolfenstein: The New Order (28th February)

Wolfenstein: The Old Blood (1st March)
The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe Edition (5th March)

Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater (2nd April)
Legacy Of Kain: Ascendance (10th April)
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus + The Freedom Chronicles DLC (23rd April)

Squirrel With A Gun (12th May)
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (15th May)
Yooka-Laylee And The Impossible Lair (28th May)

Indika (4th June)
Observation (5th June)
Wolfenstein: Youngblood (19th June)

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc (25th July)
Power Stone 2 (30th July)

Unhinged (Netflix Game) (20th August)
Katamari Damacy Reroll (23rd August)
Chants Of Sennaar (27th August)

007 First Light (17th September)
The Alters (28th September)

Alpha Protocol. This was my second full playthrough - I had played this when it was new and after all these years, the game is pretty much the same as it was back then. It's a very interesting game and very good in certain ways and awkward in others.

My version of Thorton in this run was a rookie who mostly stayed professional and didn't do a lot of needless killing, so whenever my next run comes I should probably do an unhinged lunatic version. Skillwise, I specialized in pistols - my original character was a kung fu guy - because the chain shot ability makes shootouts a lot easier, and in stealth, so I could sneak up and clamp a sleeper hold on anyone I wasn't shooting. Between these I was rarely challenged in action, just in a couple of the boss fights, really.

The most interesting and well-developed part of the game has always been its dialogue system and how the game's narrative evolves based on the stances you take and the order in which you tackle the missions. It's still quite a bit better than most games that rely on dialogue and the game's length is just about right for an RPG that is made to be replayed in different ways.

The biggest problem with the game is that it's built on the Mass Effect engine, but when you play it you realize that the game probably would have been much better off if they'd just done it as a Deus Ex-like immersive sim. The ways it's designed as an RPG that rolls dice under the hood means you get silly moments where blasting someone in the face with a shotgun point blank somehow barely scratches them because your shotgun skill isn't high enough to really do anything to higher level enemies. I couldn't help thinking that a lot of the seams in the gameplay could have been smoothed over if they'd been working in an engine that was built around stealth and world interaction.

It's also still pretty buggy, although nothing so bad that it crippled my gameplay. A couple of crashes, some instances of goofy physics, my gamepad suddenly ceasing to work...restarting and reloading the checkpoint always did the trick

Portal, two times, second with development commentaries, now i understand all the stuff with GlaDOS and Portal. Excellent game, 5/5.

Aliens Vs Predator (2010) [boxed]
A lot more fun than I expected. (It's not my favorite genre - I'd like more exploring, interacting, adventuring, etc.)
Definitely deserves better review scores, IMO.

Time for something else now. Wake me up when Dark Descent arrives here!

Finished White Shadows.

This game is a bit like Limbo and Inside. The graphics are all shades of grey but quite good. Gameplay (platforming and easy puzzles) was on the easy side except for one sequence. I did not understand a lot about the story which was very cryptic. It is quite short (2.5 hours).
The game is often available for under 2€ on GOG so you should try it if you liked Limbo and Inside.

Full list here

Blair Witch (Epic)

Gaming's most amazing forest. No one does realistic creepy forest like Bloober Team. A lot of forests in Unreal games look the same...they just use the pretty standard forest assets I guess. But in this game, all the trees and undergrowth look unique. Very atmospheric. Unfortunately the first time I played it the performance on Xbox was bad- it was 30 fps, but it felt really bad even for 30 fps. Always wanted to replay on PC once I got one that could do it justice, and then Epic comes to the rescue and made it a free weekly game a few years back.

As a Blair Witch game it probably misses the original movie feel, but that doesn't stop it from being a great pyschological adventure in its own right. I also like having the dog and his nose to give the player believable means of direction without resorting to the overused "Magic Batman Vision" that developers love these days. In the end my only dislike towards the game is exactly that- the end sequence was drawn out way too long and lost of its tension because of it. It's a problem that Bloober seem to have in most of their games...short games with overlong drawn out end sequences.

Compared to the Xbox version, this game ran like clockwork and looks amazing, so if you have it on Epic as well- then it's short enough to be worth a try.

Include me

2026

1. Travellin Cats Bundle
2. Golf Peaks
3. Mahokenshi review
4. Catie in MeowmeowLand review

Previous years:
2025