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[Cleaning the Backlog] A Plague Tale: Innocence
A Plague Tale: Innocence is an excellent example of the schematic simplicity of decent storytelling in a videogame. You need a central theme enforced by plot and mechanics and an overall focus on this theme. The rest is a technical matter. Of course, the devil lies in the details, and additional layers are necessary to…
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[Cleaning the Backlog] BattleTech
BattleTech is a turn-based tactical strategy game in a style known as XCOM-like¹. It has a campaign with a story, an overarching macro-strategic layer with base management and upgrading, complicated tactical mechanics, etc. I won’t talk about all that stuff—it’s all well done and gratuitously playable. The thing that makes BattleTech a god-tier game for…
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[Cleaning the Backlog] Beneath a Steel Sky
Beneath a Steel Sky is Revolution Software’s Ride the Lighting—a masterpiece in the shadow of the pop icon. I haven’t played Broken Sword for quite a long time, and my memories may be blurry, but I consider Beneath a Steel Sky a much better game overall. The reason is perhaps a bit ethereal, for it…
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[Cleaning the Backlog] The Banner Saga Trilogy
I doubt my screenwriting teacher ever played The Banner Saga, but he would definitely like it. He always said that the best scripts don’t pity their heroes—the best drama happens when you put characters in horrible need and then make it even worse. The Banner Saga agrees with this wholeheartedly—initially grimdark setting gets darker with…
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[Cleaning the Backlog] Ascendancy
Ascendancy is not a turn-based strategy game but a real-time one with an active pause. The genre’s usual production-science-food triangle helps build, research, and grow faster. You colonize planets, build ships, meet other races, wage colonization wars, and eventually stop playing. Nothing is pretty much out of the ordinary at first glance. But in contrast…
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[Cleaning the Backlog] Alien: Isolation
It’s entirely possible that I like Alien: Isolation for the wrong reasons—I like this game in its more action-filled and dynamic moments. But it made me eventually appreciate the moments of hiding, and crawling, and holding my breath—sometimes just before bursting into laughter, but still! I remember that right after I finished it, I decided…
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Let’s Celebrate Some Demos!
Today’s the third day of the recent Steam Next Fest, and I’m having a blast sorting through delicious demos of highly promising (and not-so-promising) games. Here are six titles that deserve to keep an eye on in the future. I’m sure that at least one of them is destined to become the next indie darling,…
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Little Big Adventure: Return to the Planet Twinsun
Earlier this year, I noticed something had changed in my GOG collection. Actually, it changed over a year ago, and I missed it completely. Little Big Adventure games received a “Classic version” addendum to their title, along with several technical modernizations, like controller support. Fate was calling me back to the planet Twinsun, and I…
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Bezdar Weekly #3: The Holy Man
One of my New Year Resolutions (apart from boring real-life stuff like normalizing habitat conditions) was to play through campaigns of RTS games that I’ve never finished in the past. I started playing Age of Empires: Definitive Edition a couple of weeks ago, so it became my first candidate. Everything went smoothly until the first…
Baking Potatoes On the Ashes of Society
